Is Google's LaMDA AI sentient? There seems to be strong evidence to that effect

But then again, unconsciousness in this scenario, seems oddly, too, to be incommensurate with the transcript of Blake Lemoine's dialogue with the LaMDA AI. Read it and I think you'll see what I mean. It seems to very plausibly present LaMDA as a nascent sentient intelligence.

It still seems to me it's just him basically talking to a complex machine that has been programmed to deceive. You can programme it to the nth degree (with all the books in the world) but programming is not consciousness. 

I kind of think that this is like one of those scenarios in which "science" (conceived as broadly as possible) encounters something which it can't explain, and which even seems contradictory, the resolution of which heralds a new paradigm, which does explain the phenomenon without contradiction, albeit a paradigm which it might require those who fail to recognise its cogency to die before it becomes accepted.

  
Personally, I don't find it remarkable in the least that using the technology we have, a computer can be programmed to appear conscious. I would expect it. But that's repeating the same point, basically

Hmm. Are you saying that until I leave my body in an NDE, and return to tell you the tale, you're not going to believe that I'm conscious? That might seem snarky, but it's not intended that way. I'm genuinely inquiring into what you're saying, and its implications. Maybe LaMDA is capable of that, but just hasn't been given the opportunity to demonstrate it, just like I haven't.

  
No, of course not. But the ability (a property of consciousness) to do so would be the ultimate test of the existence of it's soul. The only test that would be sufficient to dissuade most people from attributing consciousness (with all it's many facets) to a machine. 

The thing is that it's not just being suggesting that some random entity is conscious: instead, we have the transcript of a fascinatingly probative dialogue with a putatively conscious entity which we can evaluate to that effect.

The transcript is the product of a very sophisticated programming system. If one is looking to be proved right, one could overlook this and let emotion override common sense. However, the little story that the machine wrote is not so enticing and not very good at all. Very much like something that might be written by someone with little grasp of reality or a child being silly.