I agree, but I also believe (not deeply held! totally speculative!) that the human mind is basically nothing more than exactly this, plus memory, internal emoti

I agree, but I also believe (not deeply held! totally speculative!) that the human mind is basically nothing more than exactly this, plus memory, internal emotional states reflective of its own operation, and the ability to observe these. That is, that consciousness and intelligence is a simple emergent phenomenon of the above capabilities, and the hard part is processing those recurrent inputs in a way to synthesize coherent/logical communication. This part seems to be more or less exactly what GPT-3 does. (Of course the other major part of the human mind is the ability to train its own linguistic synthesis network. The above proposed model lacks this, but that is a process which only occurs on a long time scale for humans anyway, so I believe does not partake in the appearance of consciousness.) A part of me would really love to wire up GPT-3 to those other constituents of consciousness (memory, self-awareness, basic emotional states) and see if what comes out resembles consciousness. The other part of me is scared of the ethical implications of doing so on the off-chance that it works :/