| The AST paper is great, and the Ha Self-Interpretable Agents paper is amazing. Thanks very much for mentioning them. And now I understand better what you meant in terms of the focus on qualia that is less common. And overall your comment is very insightful. Forgive me for not giving quite as much detail in my reply as is warranted and for seeming a little critical. A lot of what you say aligns with my view. But just to mention some things I see a little differently. I guess the main thing is that it feels like you are putting things that are actually somewhat different, into the same bucket. For example, attention, and conscious versus subconscious awareness. Attention could be the selection of the currently most relevant pixels in the image. But an example of subconscious awareness might be the process of deciding which pixels to focus on, which could happen in a more automated way without conscious awareness. So there is both a selection of qualia and also a level of awareness. Things that make it to the conscious level are processed differently than the ones at the subconscious level. But both systems may be selecting which parts of the input to pay attention to. Also, I feel like you can separate out mechanical aspects of cognition from how they subjectively feel. So you could objectively say that there is for example a certain sense input, but not necessarily that the agent "feels" something like an animal. And they are not the same thing. And, you can look at emotions from an analytical perspective, separate from the question of subjective feeling. See https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2018.0002... That stuff feels like its built on kind of older paradigms without neural networks and that seems limiting, but I think its still somewhat useful. Also as far as engaging in play, just look at any pet. They will engage in play with their owners and other pets in the home. In quite sophisticated ways. In my view that exhibits intelligence and consciousness (various connotations). |