« no definition of "sentience" that I could operationalize and put into a sentience-o-meter to reliably measure »
That's because there's no such thing as a "sentience-o-meter", and there's no need to "operationalize" or "measure" anything. Instead, what's wrong with the definition given by Wikipedia, "ability to experience feelings and sensations"? That surely aligns with about 2500 years of philosophy and common sense, preceding all the techno mumbo-jumbo that confuses us today.
Sentience is a property of the higher forms of life, i.e. animals, which is derived from Latin "anima", meaning "soul" or "spirit".¹ Mammals and birds qualify because we relate to them easily and naturally.
Artefacts like GPUs don't even have metabolism, they can't procreate, they're dead matter, and having electricity running through them in intricate circuits doesn't change that.
[1] Some languages make grammatical distinctions based on whether an object is considered "spirited" or not, surfacing fundamentals of human perception of the world at the level of grammar.
What's "experience"? How do we define "experience"? How do we measure whether something "experiences" or not?
Yay! We're back to trying to operationalize a bunch of philosophical mumbo-jumbo!
Why do we think that hydrocarbons have an advantage over silicon in the "experience" department? Vitalism was disproven centuries ago - we know that hydrocarbons are chemicals like any others. Do we still have a reason to believe that hydrocarbons are special?
Is "being able to procreate" a hard requirement for "experience"? If so, can worker bees "experience" things? Or is that a property reserved for the ~1% of the "elite" non-worker bees? Or does a hive experience things collectively on "hive" level, but not individually, on "worker bee" level? Does a woman stop "experiencing" at menopause? If we built an AI Von Neumann probe, would it "experience" things - unlike other, non-self-replicating AIs? Or does an AI suddenly become capable of "experiencing" if you as much as give it a "fork" tool call to spawn more instances of itself?
If we tie "experience" to "metabolism", then, what's the line there? A car engine already powers itself with chemical reactions, maintains homeostasis and disposes of waste - crossing off a lot of the "metabolism" checklist. Is that enough for that engine to be able to "experience"? A city can tick off the entire "metabolism" checklist - can a city "experience" things? Or do we need to get back to Von Neumann probes?
The truth of the matter is: we don't have anything that would be significantly better than "a parrot experiences things, but an LLM doesn't, because I said so". Look on my works, oh mighty, and despair!
Most of us simply know that life is different from dead matter. That's a profound certitude. You may call it "philosophical mumbo-jumbo", but it wouldn't occur to most of us that we have to "measure" experience, and the questions you're raising are certainly considered interesting by some more nerdlike people, but would be rejected as scientist sophistry¹ that strays away from common sense by most others (provided they had these concepts handy in their vocabulary).
Insects like bees are usually not considered spirited or soulful. That is because they are too dissimilar from humans. It is intuitive understanding, predating any modern science. Bees, like ants, indeed live and function as collectives.
No automaton will ever be life, whatever von Neumann thought experiments are applied to it. It will always remain dead matter.
Metabolism is the material base for life, but we find (have laws regulating) that people in a coma with unrecoverable brain damage being held alive by medical care and machinery stop experiencing and hence can be switched off and allowed to die. So metabolism, while necessary, is not sufficient.
I cannot follow you in ascribing life-like properties to an LLM. I'm not passionate either about this topic. The LLM, to me, is a tool and that's it. Not sure what you mean by the last sentence (but perhaps not important).
[1] Plato wrote some mumbo-jumbo about it a long time ago:
That's because there's no such thing as a "sentience-o-meter", and there's no need to "operationalize" or "measure" anything. Instead, what's wrong with the definition given by Wikipedia, "ability to experience feelings and sensations"? That surely aligns with about 2500 years of philosophy and common sense, preceding all the techno mumbo-jumbo that confuses us today.
Sentience is a property of the higher forms of life, i.e. animals, which is derived from Latin "anima", meaning "soul" or "spirit".¹ Mammals and birds qualify because we relate to them easily and naturally.
Artefacts like GPUs don't even have metabolism, they can't procreate, they're dead matter, and having electricity running through them in intricate circuits doesn't change that.
[1] Some languages make grammatical distinctions based on whether an object is considered "spirited" or not, surfacing fundamentals of human perception of the world at the level of grammar.