[novalis78]

What makes us “real”? Has evolution built in prompts like “distort your face and shed tears when in pain to evoke a social network response” into our model? Another fascinating observation is the Buddha’s main philosophical view of “an-atta” or soullessness of the human experience and that “we” are under a self-delusion. Even consciousness (or vi-ññāna) as it gets translated in his particular context was the ability to discriminate/discern on a per sense basis (imagine each sense base coming with its own GPT model).

In a meta cognitive moment I’d like to thank everyone in this thread for their thoughtful ideas, observations and insights!

[FredPret]

If consciousness means the ability to discern what our senses tell us, then a light-switch is minimally conscious, being able to discriminate between two states. A CPU is further along on that spectrum, a human brain still further. I wonder where ChatGPT lies.