Comment by cmpalmer52

This has been the plaguing my thoughts recently as well. When I analyze (or attempt to analyze) what’s going on in the black box of gray matter in my head, I’m increasingly aware that it’s nothing magical. I’ve stated to others that the real shakeup the latest AI successes may cause won’t be that we’ve created an artificial mind, but that our own minds may be nothing more than a collection of neural subsystems. Subsystems process our vision and pass it on. They process our hearing and pass it on. They process our senses of proprioception and pass it on. Then our cortex processes all these inputs and produces outputs, which may be speech, physical reactions, or just thoughts that loop back in as another input to the cortex. Maybe our consciousness is just a supervisory neural network that monitors what the cortex is doing and feeds in adjustments. But instead of prompt/response, it’s always running, feeding back on itself, trying to predict what’s going to happen next and adjusting its models based on what we observe. It explains a little too much and I start wondering if there really is a “me” that can be described as a conscious personality and I get a little creeped out. One consolation is that we’ve always equated some new technologies with “maybe that’s the way the mind works.” The mind is like a book. The mind is like a machine. The mind is like a calculating device. The mind is like a computer. And now we’ve reached: The mind is like a super LLM with assorted subsystems. The difference is, this time, we may be right since, for really the first time, we’ve started simulating it from the bottom up.

Maybe our personality and being is just a result of our training data with a few genetic quirks thrown in. And what am I really doing when I “decide” or “create” something? Is it that much different from a LLM’s generation of language? Or an AI image generator?