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Don't you think that

> they are working towards their reward functions and optimizing the weights to reach the goal

applies to the human mind too ? Consciousness, when you think about it, might simply be a layer of indirection that any sufficiently complex network is capable of, if you give it a notion of time and events.

Certainly it's not super hard to make reinforcement learning "bots" that certainly appear as conscious as small animals are.

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I agree! Especially if those agents are many and cooperate to solve tasks - that would require an ability to model the state of other agents, which in turn can be used to model its own state, gaining self awareness.

that statement I made may apply to the human mind and our thoughts, but it also may not some would argue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind#C...

So if someone were to disagree with the view of CTOM, then they can argue that no, consciousness must be something else.

CTOM's suffer from the Russel Teapot problem. All of them suppose magical stuff is there. Of course none of it can be found in any inspection of the actual brain ...

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