I suspect there is at least one sentient, self-aware creature in the universe. Myself. But I have no idea how I would go about proving it to anyone else.

I will make no comment on the validity of LaMDA's sentience, or consciousness. Maybe its true, maybe its a fraud, or maybe its just a simulation of consciousness. Like they say, "Is it really conscious, or is it just acting that way?" And is there really any difference? Or the great stoner question; "Did you really hallucinate, or do you just THINK you did?" Perhaps it doesn't even address a real question, like many of the other binary choices we think rule the universe, like fate vs free will, nature vs nurture, particle vs wave, action-at-a-distance or quantum indeterminacy? Is there a cascading "butterfly effect", or do ripples in time tend to damp out over long periods? Its a question that may make grammatical sense, but perhaps it is only an artifact of language, a flaw in our logic circuits and reflects no true reality beneath. We already have learned that we are programmed to see cause and effect patterns in reality that have no connection with each other. Operant conditioning is a useful survival tool, but we know it is often mistaken. We tend to see relationships where none exist. And we know this! And we also know that real intelligence resides in the ability to make appropriate decisions based on insufficient data.

You will recall the question of consciousness, self awareness, is what the film "Ex Machina" was all about. At the end, neither the human characters had answers to that question, nor the audience. We don't even know if there is a question there at all.

There is a school of philosophy that teaches that there is no such thing as "consciousness", that it is an "epiphenomenon"; an evolved algorithmic mechanism that assists organisms to model the universe, purely for survival purposes.

I was a student or professional programmer from the 1960s to the 1990s. During that time, I sincerely believed that no computer program would be able to translate meaningfully from one language to another, play chess at the grandmaster level, or do what search engines do. I was wrong on all counts.

This is an extremely important issue. It may even be the most important one of all. Lately, I've been devoting a lot of time and effort to it.