Intuitive Self-Models (2024)(lesswrong.com)

This is a rather ambitious series of blog posts, in that I’ll attempt to explain what’s the deal with consciousness, free will, hypnotism, enlightenment, hallucinations, flow states, dissociation, akrasia, delusions, and more. The starting point for this whole journey is very simple: * The brain has a predictive (a.k.a. self-supervised) learning algorithm. * This algorithm builds generative models (a.k.a. “intuitive models”) that can predict incoming data. * It turns out that, in order to predict incoming data, the algorithm winds up not only building generative models capturing properties of trucks and shoes and birds, but also building generative models capturing properties of the brain algorithm itself. Those latter models, which I call “intuitive self-models”, wind up including ingredients like conscious awareness, deliberate actions, and the sense of applying one’s will. That’s a simple idea, but exploring its consequences will take us to all kinds of strange places—plenty to fill up an eight-post series! Here’s the outline: * Post 1 (Preliminaries) gives some background on the brain’s predictive learning algorithm, how to think about the “intuitive models” built by that algorithm, how intuitive self-models come about, and the relation of this whole series to Philosophy Of Mind. * Post 2 (Conscious Awareness) proposes that our intuitive self-models include an ingredient called “conscious awareness”, and that this ingredient is built by the predictive learning algorithm to represent a serial aspect of cortex computation. I’ll discuss ways in which this model is veridical (faithful to the algorithmic phenomenon that it’s modeling), and ways that it isn’t. I’ll also talk about how intentions and decisions fit into that framework. * Post 3 (The Active Self) focuses more specifically on the intuitive self-model that almost everyone reading this post is experiencing right now (as opposed to the other possibilities covered later in the series), which I call