The book is more about using category theory to explain transformers. I only read the first few pages, but I like the description of consciousness as your short term memory. That is exactly what you are aware of at this moment, roughly 7 tokens or 100 bits. Your 10^9 bit long term memory is unconscious until you recall something from it.
Short term memory is an important component of a language model. It is where long term learning occurs, by strengthening the connections between the position encoded tokens in them. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Fri, Mar 6, 2026, 8:14 AM John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sunday, February 22, 2026, at 12:49 PM, Matt Mahoney wrote: > > Consciousness (type 2, inner self awareness) and free will still require > explanations. The only evidence we have for their existence is our own > feelings. Feelings come from neurons firing. We feel good about thinking > and doing things because it motivates us to not lose those feelings by > dying. This results in more offspring. > > > The trend I referred to is that the brain connects or exists in > consciousness verses it being solely an internally generated experience, > like Faggin's quantum fields consciousness. There’s plenty of evidence for > that. Gauthier describes a model/framework, not a theory, around generally > accepted descriptions allowing for distributed consciousness using his > reference to pure consciousness with us being sort of nodes in filtered > reduction. He does rely on there being a pure and a less than pure which is > reasonable. > > Here is a more detailed paper with Consciousness as a Functor, modeling > AGI with conscious and unconscious processes aiming for a computational > theory: > > https://people.cs.umass.edu/~mahadeva/papers/catagi.pdf > > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Td94236ee8c040564-M1cf74c7dc80e7cee5251a256> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Td94236ee8c040564-M585a22db3dddf34d9a7877c0 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
