If page 33 depicts the working of the brain on a very high level, the world model (or simulator) residing inside the agent must contain a model/simulator of the agent itself.
Could this give rise to self perception or consiousness?
Could this give rise to self perception or consiousness?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-representat...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/self-representational-approac...
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness05/L...
Also, if anyone is watching Westworld (spoilers), it seems to come to the same conclusion funnily enough. What finally gives the androids consciousness is some kind of recursive idea of listening to themselves.
0. https://www.amazon.com/Prey-Michael-Crichton/dp/0061703087/r...
I found a pdf version of the book here if you are interested. http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/Julian-Jaynes-Origin-of...
So consciousness was not raised at this point. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be an emergent property.
[1] Am at NIPS and attended the speech.
I thought this ommission was deliberate to avoid distracting philisophical ratholes that weren't core to his talk.
a) Self-perception does not seem like consciousness to me at all. In meditation, if done properly, there is very little self left. It feels more like pure awareness. It is almost the opposite of the model of the self that the brain constructs.
b) I fail to see how the fact that a mechanism refers to itself should somehow give rise to the feeling of conciousness. Why would it? Nobody would predict consciousness from that if we would not already know it exists and it's easy to imagine a device that has a model of itself and is not self-aware.
I understand the need to somehow fit this into our scientific framework, and the idea that "consciousness is just what it feels to have a brain" is the best thing we have, but I don't think it explains anything. There is something we are missing.
Many definitions can coexist, some more actionable than others. "Being aware of the existence of oneself in the world, and being able to reflect on oneself's decision" seems relatively practical. So, Self-perception + self-reflection = consciouness (as a definition)
From this starting point, it seems reasonable to derive that consciousness can arise from 1) mental representation of the world that include oneself 2) empathy for others (I can guess why this other worker has taken this decision) that, once applied to the actions of the self as if it were an external agent, gives self-reflection.