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GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it.
(garymarcus.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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I'd argue that the idea of self awareness or needs/wants is tangential to the notion of qualia. A system can be self aware, and develop needs without necessarily being conscious and having an internal experience. What needs and wants really boil down to is that the system is trying to maintain a particular state. To maintain homeostasis, the system needs to react to external inputs and take actions that keep it in the desired state. For example, a thermostat could be said to have a "need" to maintain a particular temperature, but it could hardly be argued that it has some sort of qualia.
Why sentience exists is a really interesting question all of itself in my opinion as it's not an obviously necessary quality within a self aware system. I suspect it may be related to having a theory of mind. When a system starts to model itself then perhaps you end up with some sort of a resonance where it thinks about its own thoughts and that's what creates internal experience.
We also have to define what we mean by intelligence here. My definition would be a system that has a model of a particular domain, and is able to make judgments regarding outcomes of different actions. I don't think mere intelligence requires self awareness or consciousness.
This is right. Having things like beliefs and desires is called "intentionality," and is orthogonal to both sentience/sapience and first-person subjectivity (qualia). You can have beliefs and desires without any accompanying qualitative experience and vice versa.