To be clear, if GNW is “consciousness” (as Dehaene describes it), then the attention schema is “how we think about consciousness”. So this seems to be at the wrong level! [...] But it turns out, he wants to be one level up!
I thought, thank goodness, Graziano (and steve2152) gets it. But in the moral implications section, you immediately start talking about attention schemas rather than simply attention. Attention schemas aren’t necessary for consciousness or sentience; they’re necessary for meta-consciousness. I don’t mean to deny that meta-consciousness is also morally important, but it strikes me as a bad move to skip right over simple consciousness.
This may make little difference to your main points. I agree that “There are (presumably) computations that arguably involve something like an ‘attention schema’ but with radically alien properties.” And I doubt that I could see any value in an attention schema with sufficiently alien properties, nor would I expect it to see value in my attentional system.
When I read
I thought, thank goodness, Graziano (and steve2152) gets it. But in the moral implications section, you immediately start talking about attention schemas rather than simply attention. Attention schemas aren’t necessary for consciousness or sentience; they’re necessary for meta-consciousness. I don’t mean to deny that meta-consciousness is also morally important, but it strikes me as a bad move to skip right over simple consciousness.
This may make little difference to your main points. I agree that “There are (presumably) computations that arguably involve something like an ‘attention schema’ but with radically alien properties.” And I doubt that I could see any value in an attention schema with sufficiently alien properties, nor would I expect it to see value in my attentional system.