[visarga]

So "the illusion" is like a GPT or StableDiffusion model making stuff up based on conditioning. Nothing mysterious, we have AI that can do that. The same simulator predicts not just how the world will evolve, but also actions and their estimated rewards. It's an imagination based planning system.

Bringing all perceptions together into the simulation, integrating them into the same reference system, and using them to imagine, plan, act and learn - that could be consciousness.

[nathan_compton]

Yes, but why would such a system experience anything? I'm a died in the wool monist materialist but I can acknowledge that there is something tricky (at the very least) going on here.

[visarga]

We create representations from our sensorial data and values from our reward signals. We are part of a larger system and our actions are filtered and rewarded by the environment. We feed on this system to learn, basically we train on it.