In the final chapter we begin to think about what happens when virtual humans reach their most extreme form and develop sentience - the virtual sapiens we introduced in Chapter 1. Of course it’s a moot point as to whether an artificial entity can ever be “sentient”, and of course what we mean by “sentience”. Equate sentience with having a soul and the debate probably gets even more heated.
We equate sentience with a combination of internal persistent and continuous narrative and sense of self, an embodied, grounded, objective experience, self motivation and direction and personhood.
We’ll collect further observations on this topic and related links below.