If I wanted to play fast and loose, I would claim that our sense of ourselves as having a first-person at all is part of an evolutionary solution to the problem of learning from other peoples’s experiences (wait, wasn’t there a post like that recently? Or was that about empathy...). It merely seems like a black box to us because we’re too good at it, precisely because it’s so important.
Somehow we develop a high-level model of the world with ourselves and other people in it, and then this level of abstraction actually gets hooked up to our motivations—making this a subset of social instincts.
When imagining hooking up abstract learned world models to motivation for AI like this, I sometimes imagine something much less “fire and forget” than the human brain, something more like people testing, responding to, and modifying an AI that’s training or pre-training on real-world data. Evolution doesn’t get to pause me at age 4 and rummage around in my skull.
If I wanted to play fast and loose, I would claim that our sense of ourselves as having a first-person at all is part of an evolutionary solution to the problem of learning from other peoples’s experiences (wait, wasn’t there a post like that recently? Or was that about empathy...). It merely seems like a black box to us because we’re too good at it, precisely because it’s so important.
Somehow we develop a high-level model of the world with ourselves and other people in it, and then this level of abstraction actually gets hooked up to our motivations—making this a subset of social instincts.
When imagining hooking up abstract learned world models to motivation for AI like this, I sometimes imagine something much less “fire and forget” than the human brain, something more like people testing, responding to, and modifying an AI that’s training or pre-training on real-world data. Evolution doesn’t get to pause me at age 4 and rummage around in my skull.