USH'S MATRIX GAME FOURTH ASSIGNMENT (PHILOSOPHY PATH)- 'The Journey'

A short walk later... and you are standing inside Melitus' room at the steel factory- but the iron lung, and Melitus himself, are not there.

Standing there, however, are the butler, and the string quartet, and Melitus's medical team, all as originally described. They are all standing in a row in front of you, a few metres away.

"Odd"

"more comparisons?"

"A question that goes back to what we were talking about before," says Melitus. "I want each of you to identify everyone in this room that is sentient."

"everyone except the string quartet I think"

"I would be interested to hear your reasoning."

"From what I can see I would say only the butler, afterall he is the only who seems to be bale to act independant of his programming, he can hold a conversation and understand us. From what I have seen, and this is only what I have seen, the others are just prgrams who do one thing and only that thing.

The medical team just attends to your body and the string quartet simply plays music. far less advanced than the butler."

neah...the butler and the med team are sentient.
BUT...i don't really know what a string quartet is 🙂

The string quartet are the musicians, Dexx. They were playing the music when you first visited Melitus.

they're all sentient.
They're code imitates a real human life form, even though they are here to do a speciffic thing, like playing music, or healing, or serving someone. They can make decisions, and are therefore sentient.

"The chicken can make decisions," says Melitus. "Where do you draw the line for sentience?"

"I never saw them do much, that's why I thought"

"but if they are as well programmed as the others, chances are that they are then I agree with Rade they are all sentient"

"They can make decisions and debate about higher intellectual subjects"

the chicken's decisions are only in his reactions to certain stimuli.
It's a basic level of choice

Sorry, do you mean sentience is a basic level of choice, or that the chicken has only a basic level?

the chicken was at a basic level of choice...wich doesn't qualify as sentient.
I don't think i have a concrete limit to sentience

"I can build a relatively simple computer programme, simply programmed to give the same responses the Butler does," says Melitus, "and give it the appearance of the Butler. Would that programme be sentient? It would be capable of choice based on external stimuli."

that's what i'm saying. it has to be more than based on a response on stimuli, in order for it to be sentient. The program wouldn't be sentient. It would just be programmed to react in a certain way, when encountering ....something.
Now, i don't know how complicated, nor how your AI works, and you know i have a certain refrain when it comes to considering a machine sentient in any way. But i guess that i can call these humans simulations sentient in such a way as to set them above a chicken, a teracote soldier, or a waterfall

"I would agree that it takes more than a response to stimuli to make something sentient," says Melitus. "What makes you so sure that the Butler is beyond that?"

"it imitates a human, does it not? I;m sure that you treat these replicas the same attention you do with the waterfall, and so on"

"Ah, well now," says Melitus, "that depends on what I require from the object concerned. So there was nothing definitive about the Butler that made you think that- merely that you thought it logical that he was an accurate simulation of a human, yes?"