Cool, but ... I maintain that none of this is about consciousness. Knowledge representation, abstraction and compression via symbolism, communication of structure, common protocols and standards for describing physical phenomena ... these are all intelligence tasks. Specifically, the communication-related stuff would be part of social and linguistic intelligence. If you want some labels that convey the "inter-agent" aspect without confusing everyone, I think those would do.
The thing you call "occupying representation" ... a conscious agent can do it, but an unconscious agent can too. The ability to decompress information and construct models from symbolic communication does not require or imply that the agent has its own qualia or first-person experiences. And I do agree that, for the practical/utilitarian purpose of Getting Things Done, this is useful and is all you need for cooperative agents. Like I said when I first posted on this thread, phenomenal consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient for an intelligent system. I think your comment about "Gloobledeglock" actually illustrates my point. Communication breaks down here because you haven't tied Gloobledeglock to a causative external event. If you said something like, "I feel Gloobledeglock whenever I get rained on," then I could surmise (with no guarantee of correctness) that you feel whatever it is I feel when I get rained on. Observable events, in the world external to both our minds, are things we can hold in common and use as the basis of communication protocols. We can't hold qualia in common, or transfer them (even partially). > AGI researchers are so occluded by first-person. Umm since when? I certainly don't think an AGI system has to be an isolated singleton that only deals with first-person information. I think the kerfuffle in this thread is about you appearing to claim that Universal Communication Protocols and the ability to "occupy representation" are something they are not. We're not trying to give an exaggerated importance to phenomenal consciousness ... quite the opposite, in fact. We're just saying that the systems you describe don't have it. Signing off now. Good luck with your work. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T41ac13a64c3d48db-M0b99c375007957bfa978963b Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
