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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

It only makes sense if

- you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal

- the system has a working model of the environment, including our value judgements for all states, which are basically our emotions

Such a system can have experience because it has a latent space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be an agent because of the external environment and internal models of the environment, which include imagination and emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.

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Experience isn’t the right way to put it. The system you describe is straightforward and makes total sense how it can understand and act upon its environment. What is unexplainable, and perhaps always will be, is the awareness that I am. Even if I meditate and remove all aspects of the surrounding world from me what I’m left with is a pure awareness that groups of neurons simply can’t explain.

Why am I present at all and not just a mindless automaton? Surely an automaton could evolve and be just as successful simply by being a complex neural network. This is why I, and lots of others, think that awareness is fundamental.

You can never remove internal body sensations even in meditation. The "self" is just a stationary point in this inner space, an element referenced in most situations, but not all, such as when listening to great music we can forget about ourselves.

So my idea was - we have an actual system for representing sensations, a system for imagination and a system for value prediction. We have the hardware for it, and we train our consciousness hardware on environment data.

If you're thinking - how can simple neurons or protein interactions do this? it's the same with a neural net. We don't understand how it can tell cats from dogs, or why it can answer our questions so well. Yet it does. Hard to believe unless you see it and even then it's hard to accept, unless you come up with your own private inputs and test it in a way that is sure not to be memorized.

No I’m saying it makes total sense that neurons can model the environment and act upon them. That isn’t at all hard to grasp. What is unexplainable is the fundamental awareness of being a thing at all.

Essentially why is it like something to be this system of neurons modeling the environment and acting on it.

Yes exactly

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