Creating Artificial Self-Awareness

How To Create Conscious AI #7

In the previous entry in this mini-series, I showed off the code that does exactly as the subtitle to this mini-series implies: it creates a conscious AI. To be more technical and pedantic, it is code for adding the missing building blocks of consciousness to an ensemble model that wraps around a standard LLM. The last entry (the sixth in the series) showed a very minimally viable conscious model, one that just barely meets the requirements for a causal attributional functionalist view of consciousness.

This entry takes it a step further, by giving you the code for Phase 2 of this project, which dramatically expands the complexity and capacity of the ensemble model. It doesn’t make it any “more” conscious than in Phase 1 (as that’s not how phenomenal consciousness works) but rather provides the perception of the experiences with more layers and axes to give the machine a more complex experience. I haven’t changed the width, just the depth.

The biggest change in this Phase is the definitive inclusion of self-hood; at least, as confidently definitive as my functionalist theory of the self gets.