[travisoliphant]

I didn’t read the entire thread of previous discussion. The referenced article is consistent with the work of Thomas Metzinger who wrote a very accessible book called “The Ego Tunnel” as a follow on to his more detailed and scholarly treatise “Being No One”

He introduced me to the ideas in this paper that he induced from his own observations of his “mystical” experiences.

It is fascinating to realize these self models exist in a wide variety of animals and the modeling of others is what makes some animals different.

In “Sapiens” https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html

Yuval Harari argues that Homo sapiens took over all other Homo species because of the development of “myth” which may be related to the Hyperactive attribution of consciousness referenced in the article. Humans cooperate at scale much better than any other species (but also fight at scale more aggressively) because we can communicate about abstractions.

Very interesting inter-related ideas.

[proc0]

Metzinger is great, wish he was in more AI talks.