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TheAncientGeek comments on Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept - LessWrong
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Is that a fact?
As before, what makes no sense read literally, but can be read charitably if "agency" is substituted for "consciousness".
Looks like it's equal to agency. But theoretical novelty doesn't consist in changing the meaning of a word.
From my original comment:
So, yes, I'm trying to equate consciousness with agency.
Anyway, I think you're highlighting a very valuable point: agency is not equivalent to self-awareness. Then again, it's not at all clear that consciousness is equivalent to self awareness, as Eli pointed out in the comment which began this whole thread. Here, I am trying to dissolve consciousness, or at least progress in that direction. If consciousness were exactly equivalent to self awareness, then that would be it: there would be no more dissolving to be done. Self awareness can be measured, and can be tracked though developmental stages in humans.
I think part of value of saying "consciousness = projected agency" is that it partially explains why consciousness and self awareness seem so closely linked, though different. If you have a black-box utility-maximizer model available for modelling others, it seems intuitively likely that you'd use it to model yourself as well, leading directly to self awareness. This even leads to a falsifiable prediction: children should begin to model their own minds around the same time they begin to model other minds. They should be able to accurately answer counterfactual questions about their own actions at around the same time that they acquire a theory of mind.
I don't have to maintain that consciousness is no more or less than self awareness to assert that self awareness us part of consciousness,but not part of agency.
Self awareness mat be based on the same mechanisms as the ability to model external agents, and arrive at the same time....but it us misleading ti call consciousness a projected quality, like beauty in the eye if the beholder.