Then where does self-reference appear in other animals? Famously most higher animals such as mammals still fail the mirror test.
I agree with the point that self-reference comes "for free" due to computationalist reasons, namely Quining and Godel and liar's paradox all show that. But then self-computations should be more prevalent relative to phenomena like consciousness. Example could be the human immune system functioning, in that on the level of DNA there is some encoding of identifying what is "self", etc.
Also if self reference is easy for the reasons he mentions then should we see non-LLM systems, say AlphaGo or image generators, learning a sense of self vs other? E.g. inside AlphaGo's black box it could utilize a concept of "my strategy".
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Then where does self-reference appear in other animals? Famously most higher animals such as mammals still fail the mirror test.
I agree with the point that self-reference comes "for free" due to computationalist reasons, namely Quining and Godel and liar's paradox all show that. But then self-computations should be more prevalent relative to phenomena like consciousness. Example could be the human immune system functioning, in that on the level of DNA there is some encoding of identifying what is "self", etc.
Also if self reference is easy for the reasons he mentions then should we see non-LLM systems, say AlphaGo or image generators, learning a sense of self vs other? E.g. inside AlphaGo's black box it could utilize a concept of "my strategy".