Are AI engines such as Claude sentient? My considered opinion, tentatively held, is that they are not. But it all depends on what the word means. Malcolm Pollack in an e-mail writes,
I was focusing on “sentient” because it’s a slippery concept, and often tossed around as if it means the same thing as “conscious”. Etymologically (from Latin “sensus”) it just means “feel,” or “perceive”, and obviously it shares that with our word “sense” — but computers, and even toasters, can have “sensors” too.
Malcolm is right that ‘sentient’ is often used interchangeably with ‘conscious.’ But is everything we refer to as a sensor sentient? That is equivalent to asking: Is everything we call a sensor conscious? I say No.
The Moth and the Thermostat
What is the difference between an insect (a moth, say) which I take to be a sentient being, and a thermostat which I take to be insentient? Both are ‘sensors’ functionally speaking. The moth literally senses light and approaches it; the thermostat ‘senses’ an increase in temperature and “turns on’ the AC. Note the ‘raised eyebrows.’ It is AS IF the thermostat senses, when in reality it only ‘senses.’ Thermostats don’t feel heat and smoke detectors do not smell smoke. Of course, I have no objection to the use of ‘sensor’ to refer to thermostats, smoke detectors, circuit breakers, and so on, as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that these devices are literally conscious. And I have no objection to talk of a thermostat ‘turning on’ the AC as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that the thermostat is an agent that decides to do something.
As I see it, a thermostat is a merely mechanical contraption and wholly insentient, strictly speaking, whereas a moth is a sentient being.
What I want to say about Claude and his ‘colleagues’ is that they are wholly insentient mechanical contraptions that differ from smoke detectors and thermostats only in that they are vastly more complex, and that this complexity does not build a “gradualist bridge” (to borrow a phrase from Daniel Dennett) from insentient/insensate matter to mind, the lowest level of mind being sentience.
Here is an argument. (a) Only living things are sentient; (b) thermostats are not living things; ergo (c) thermostats are not sentient.
Now substitute ‘AI engine’ for ‘thermostat.’
This argument does not settle the matter: it is not ‘rationally coercive’ as I like to say. Malcolm could run it in reverse with no breach of logical propriety. He could, not unreasonably, deny (c) and then deny (a). I don’t expect that he or anyone will deny (b): thermostats and AIs don’t grow on trees, etc.
Your move, Malcolm. Do you agree that a functioning (as opposed to malfunctioning) sensor needn’t be sentient (conscious)? If not why not?
Do you agree that there is a powerful, albeit non-coercive, case for denying that AIs are sentient?
Dear Sir,
It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. But I follow your writing on both Substack and the new iteration of your blog. I hope you are doing well.
I’ve read several of your recent posts on artificial intelligence. This post on the blog of American philosopher David Baker regarding the lack of consciousness in modern models might be relevant to your thoughts:
https://dbakesquared.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-todays-ais-cant-be
Since various public discussions have recently arisen regarding the security challenges posed by AI, I recommend a few articles I’ve read recently that you might find interesting:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-11/anthropic-says-yemen-group-used-claude-in-missile-development
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/behind-door-2-everyone-dies
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/ai-silicon-valley.html
https://ai-frontiers.org/articles/suicidal-compassion-how-utilitarianism-at-ai-companies-endangers-humanity
Kind regards,
Miloš Milojević
Belgrade
Hi Bill,
First, I’d like to paste in the full paragraph from the letter I sent you:
In this I was only questioning the usefulness of the term “sentient”; I would never suggest that thermostats are conscious. I think sensing and being conscious are orthogonal concepts; and that speaking of “sentience” muddles them together in an unhelpful way. Does the entity in question sense things? Well, yes, a thermostat does, a moth does, and so do I, but if what’s of interest is whether it’s conscious, well then let’s just focus on that. (There are bacteria, for example, that sense things. Are they conscious? “Sentient”? I don’t know.)
Are there gradations of consciousness? Almost certainly, I’d say, and from personal experience. But we can talk about all that just in terms of consciousness. So why talk about “sentience”?
As soon as I’d posted this I realized I hadn’t answered the second question you asked me:
Indeed I do. I think the onus probandi is on those who would insist that these things are conscious, not least because ascribing consciousness to them opens the door to all the rights, considerations, and privileges that come with personhood. I do worry, though, that the AIs will simulate personhood so convincingly that popular emotions are going to shift the burden the other way, and we are going to be seeing a lot of “benefit of the doubt” and “err on the side of caution” arguments being made. (It also doesn’t help that our decaying, feminized society is so easily swayed into deadly errors by pathological, misguided altruism.)
As for your second comment, burden-of-proof considerations are tricky, so I won’t take a position on who bears the burden of proof. I will simply repeat what I said: a strong case can be made for denying that AIs are sentient in the sense I gave the term in my first response above. But I would also say that AIs are not subjects of intentional (object-directed) states either, for reasons I won’t go into now.
I agree with the rest of what you say. AIs simulate personhood so convincingly that the pressure (social and political) will be on to ascribe to them rights and other attributes of persons. And yes, feminization has a deleterious role to play. The pressure may be impossible to resist when extremely sexy humanoid female robots driven by AI engines come along. Among them, sexbots! Prostitutes of Nevada! Organize now before it is too late and you are out of work.
The Problem of Other Minds, once discussed only by weirdos in their academic towers , will soon be coming in concrete form to a home or business near you!
B. S. the silly superannuated socialist calls for banning AI development. Won’t happen, and can’t happen in the current geo-political situation.
Malcolm,
Please read a few pages into John Birch’s THE EDGE OF SENTIENCE. Dmitri provided a link. This will inform you as to how I am using ‘sentience.’ I am not borrowing my usage from Birch; I just now for the first read anything by him. The term has been in the literature for a long time together with its ethical implications.
The book by Birch is $36 at Amazon. I will buy it. I’ve read enough to know that it is ‘solid.’
This is my third response to you.
The definition of Sentient in Merriam Webster dictionary is a good starting point — Capable of sensing or feeling : conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling.
By that definition LLMs are not sentient. Whether we would add “yet” to the previous statement some day would be largely socially determined or decided for us by rogue AI or bad guys who come in control of AI per AI doom-and-gloom influencers like Yudkowsky. Silicon valley magnates like the CEO of Nvidia are doing all they can to persuade us to adopt their preferred stance.
Dmitri,
So you think that whether or not AIs are sentient could be “socially determined or decided for us by rogue AI or bad guys who come in control of AI”? I disagree. There is a fact of the matter here. Either an AI system s sentient or it is not regardless of what anyone says or thinks.
Bill
One of a few times I’d have to disagree with you. I think that there many circumstances in which what is fact of the matter is socially determined. Definitely in the areas of social, legal, non-perceptual or non-logical matters. Just a few examples: crime/not crime, legitimate/illegitimate government, fair/unfair trade treaty (hello from Canada!). The case of sentience in my opinion is much closer to these than to the question whether H2O is water. In short, I am with Nelson Goodman on that. In a nutshell: truth is a matter of fact but within a “world”, internal coherence within that world is important, not everything goes. And some worlds are MUCH better, morally and otherwise, than the others. I know you think differently.
Dmitri,
In some cases, facts are socially constituted. “I pronounce you man and wife” said by a Justice of the Peace makes you and your lady love man and wife. But not all facts are socially constituted. I’ll dig up my critique of Goodman’s “Ways of Worldmaking.”
I’d recommend the book I have begun reading on the subject by Jonathan Birch, a philosopher from LSE. It is directly relevant to sentience discussion in this thread. It is available on LSE site as a free PDF: https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126246/1/9780192697684_web.pdf
The epigraph alone is worth it IMHO:
You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’,
‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult
to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other
peoples lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is
not thrilling , but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s
most important.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, letter to Norman Malcolm,
16 November 1944
Dmitri,
Great quotation from LW! And thanks for the link and for dropping by.
Malcolm,
I am using ‘sentience’ to refer to the lowest level of consciousness, non-intentional consciousness. But there is more to consciousness than sentience since there is also consciousness-of or what the philosophers call intentionality. This is why there is a use for both ‘sentience’ and its adjectival form and ‘consciousness’ and its adjectival form.
You might enjoy Wallace I. Matson’s SENTIENCE (U of Cal Press, 1976) which is crisp, clear, and written from a materialist POV.
Thank you all; this is clarifying. I will look at the Birch PDF first of all.