And what makes the voice in your head can't understand what it says. There are two parts, at least, to sentience: the observer and the actor. In yogic traditio

And what makes the voice in your head can't understand what it says. There are two parts, at least, to sentience: the observer and the actor. In yogic traditions, "you" are the part that "hears" the voice in your head, not the voice itself. I think this, while it may not necessarily be true of "real" minds, has a lot of utility when it comes to designing artificial ones. I think general AI is probably going to be lots of individual parts structured around a central observational unit, which then makes preprogrammed higher level decisions on where to distribute inputs and outputs of several external nn, score the results of it's actions, and then use the results for reinforcement and/NEAT or something similar to improve it's central decision making. This technique of a simple, preprogrammed decision maker given inputs and outputs of stochastic processes is already in use in autonomous navigation (see the GT robotics course on coursera)[1]. The actor doesn't need to understand meaning, the observer assigns meaning to the actions of the actor. 1. "Free Online Course: Control of Mobile Robots from Coursera | Class Central" https://www.classcentral.com/course/conrob-404 https://www.classcentral.com/course/conrob-404