Philosophically, "sentience" is something that isn't even possible to fully measure and define: how do you know that someone is really conscious. not just a "ghost in the shell"? Aristotal ~~one said~~ *did not once say* "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts", and this idea is known as **Gestalt**. But even if we do define sentience as "exhibiting human-like behaviors", there is a non-negligible chance we have not and maybe even cannot achieve sentience in a machine.

First of all, machines are made out of completely different material than humans, and we don't even know how the human brain works! There could be physical processes which provide sentience and enable true "human-like" behavior that we haven't even discovered yet! **Quantum mechanics** may be important here, as some speculate that the human body uses quantum processes, and quantum mechanics in general is often tied to consciousness with the **Boltzmann Brain** conjecture.

Even what we do know is next-to-impossible to replicate in a machine: the human brain has over 86 billion neurons and *100 trillion* synaptic connections, more than all but the biggest supercomputers. And all of these neurons work in parallel, whereas computers are highly sequential and even GPUs rarely have more than 1,000 cores. Furthermore, the brain runs on more than just electric charges: there are a huge array of chemicals and separate processes (e.g. glial cells) which influence mood. It is by far more complex than any machine we have designed, and likely will be for a very long time.

Furthermore, some people speculate that consciousness is not just in the brain, but in the body as well. And one cannot be truly sentient if they do not have a physical form that can interact with the world, which software such as chatbots don't. Related, other parts of the human body besides the brain influence mood, such as gut bacteria. This is known as **Embidied Consciosness** or **Embodied Cognition**. While we have been designing robots (see: Boston Robotics), they aren't nearly nimble as humans and break easier because they are too heavy and don't have the self-regeneration biological life does.

Lastly, many people simply believe that chatbots don't truly "think" or "understand", but just repeat words to produce something that *sounds* like real emotion and understanding: they are **stochastic parrots**, similar to how a parrot can repeat human words but really cannot understand them and has trouble even associating them with objects. Chatbots have been able to do limited forms of reasoning, which puts the "understanding" part in question. But as they only communicate off of text and are statistical models, it's really hard to say that they display real emotion. Does an AI-generated voice display "real emotion" when it is reading a sad story? Similarly, you cannot say that an AI is sentient just because it acts like a human, as it is only repeating former humans' text. Though theories like the **Bicameral Mind** call this into question, and claim that simply claiming to be sentient *is* enough to be so (so even it's a simple program saying "I am sentient" may qualify). What will it take for us to get a chatbot to truly "understand" and "feel"? Well, first we have to discover what "understanding" and "feeling" really are, which goes back to philosophy and the first paragraph.
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