[AnimalMuppet]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by metacognition, but I suspect you mean something that I think is critical - the ability to watch itself think.

That is, humans can sense the surrounding world. (Some people call that sentience.) Humans can think about what they sense, organize it, categorize it, find patterns, think both inductively and deductively. (Some people call that sapience.) But humans can do something else - as they think, they can observe their own thinking, and then think about that. "How do I reason? Why did I decide that? How do I determine what evidence is accurate?" I don't know if "metacognition" the the word that people use for that, but it's part of what I think AGI is.

[jasonjmcghee]

Yes- being able to reflect on its own thoughts.

You could argue being able to observe and think about what was just said aligns with ReAct (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.03629.pdf) - maybe a tweak to directly assessing a previous thought, and modifying output / thought process based on the assessment accordingly would help, but I'm not sure that's quite enough.

If it can't ask "why" and step back through why it thinks something, I think we'll keep having the confident hallucination problem- rather than "I don't know".

But maybe that's touching on the quality of AGI.

Is "reasoning" a necessity for the base definition?

[mindcrime]

But I suspect you mean something that I think is critical - the ability to watch itself think.

That's pretty close to the way the term is normally used.

FWIW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/#Meta