A lot of the hopes in regard to AGI in LLMs seem to focus on just making the models bigger, or feeding them even more information. On the other hand, some researchers in the AGI space seem to move in a completely different direction, trying to use neural networks to simulate different parts of a brain, moving away from language altogether.
But what I'm wondering is this: might it be a more productive avenue to consider an LLM not as an entire mind, but as a single part of an hypothetical artifical psyche, which excels at some of the overarching tasks of consciousness (such as acting within a cultural context and epistemological framework), but can delegate other aspects to more fitting subsystems? Could it be combined with other networks optimized for different tasks? Potentially, this could just be done by having inputs from other parts of this artificial psyche fed in as prompts, translated by an encoder/decoder of the likes of CLIP, i.e. a decoder that can translate ideas between different liminal spaces.
The work that I keep remembering in this context is Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [1], which I stumbled upon here on HN [2] [3]. Jaynes believes that consciousness is not an innate ability, but a cultural achievement - in order to become conscious, one first has to learn (through others) to conceptualize consciousness, and to think of oneself as a thinking being. He insists that consciousness is not a necessity for human agency, and that humanity has been building civilizations and using technologies long before humans discovered (or achieved) consciousness. Jaynes puts forward the idea of an ancient, non-conscious human mind based on, upon other things, "verbal hallucinations" - thoughts and memories that involuntarily enter as associations, but whose origins are interpreted by the mind to not be within itself, but somewhere outside of it, such as in a divine monologue; thought, to the pre-conscious mind, is the incessant blabbering of the Gods.
It seems that LLMs would excel in the role of this "camera" of the mind - as the source of divine monologue and divine instructions, that can then be compared with memories, interpreted and executed by more specialized subsystems. Might it be feasible to give up the plan to make AGI self-aware altogether and instead build an AGI powered by a GPT-4 ascended to divinity, just as ignorant of its own existence as ever?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...