To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience. I don't believe in a soul, or that organic matter has special properties that allows sentience to arise.
this is the popular sentiment with programmers and spectators right now, but even taking all those assumptions as true, it still doesn't mean we are close to anything.
Consider the complexity of sentient, multicellular organism. That's trillions of cells all interacting with each-other and the environment concurrently. Even if you reduce that down to just the processes with a brain, that's still more things happening in and between those neurons than anything we could realistically model in a programme. Programmers like to reduce that complexity down by only looking at the synaptic connections between neurons, and ignoring the everything else the cells are doing.
this is the popular sentiment with programmers and spectators right now, but even taking all those assumptions as true, it still doesn't mean we are close to anything.
Consider the complexity of sentient, multicellular organism. That's trillions of cells all interacting with each-other and the environment concurrently. Even if you reduce that down to just the processes with a brain, that's still more things happening in and between those neurons than anything we could realistically model in a programme. Programmers like to reduce that complexity down by only looking at the synaptic connections between neurons, and ignoring the everything else the cells are doing.