alt Hacker NewsSurely you must realize all the language you've adopted to make this project sound important and interesting very much puts you inf the realm of "metaphysical claim", right? You can't throw around words like "consciousness, self, mind" and then claim to be presenting something purely technical. Unless you're sitting on a trove of neurological, sociological data do experimentation the world has yet to witness.
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OP here. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that "consciousness" or "self" are metaphysical terms.
In the fields of Cybernetics and Systems Theory (Ashby, Wiener, Hofstadter), these are functional definitions, not mystical ones:
Self = A system’s internal model of its own boundaries and state.
Mind = The dynamic maintenance of that model against entropy.
I am taking the strict Functionalist stance: If a system performs the function of recursive self-modeling, it has a "Self." To suggest these words are reserved only for biological substrates is, ironically, the metaphysical claim (Carbon Chauvinism). I’m treating them as engineering specs.
I think it's like mythology explaining the origin of the universe. We try to explain what we don't understand using existing words that may not be exactly correct. We may even make up new words entirely trying to grasp at meaning. I think he is on to something, just because I have seen some interesting things myself while trying to use math equations as prompts for AI. I think the attention head being auto-regressive means that when you trigger the right connections in the model, like euler, fractal, it recognizes those concepts in it's own computation. It definitely causes the model to reflect and output differently.