the self is a model of what it would be like to be a person. It so happens that the brain is not a person. The brain cannot feel anything. It's a physical system. Neurons cannot feel anything. They're just little molecular machines with a Turing machine inside of them. They cannot make themselves feel anything. They cannot even approximate arbitrary functions except by evolution, which takes a very long time. So, what do we do if you are a brain that figures out it would be very useful to know what it's like to be a person? It makes fun. It makes the simulation of a person, a simulacrum, to be more clear. Simulation basically is isomorphic and all that in the behavior of a person, and that thing is pretending to be a person. It's a story about a person, basically. You and me, we are persons. We ourselves, we are stories in a movie that the brain is creating. There are characters in that movie, and the movie is a complete simulation. It's a VR that is generating the neocortex.

and you will meet the self as the character in this VR, and in that character, the brain writes our experiences, so we feel what it's like to be exposed to the reward function. We feel what it's like to be in our universe, and we don't feel that we are not actually conscious. We don't feel that we are a story, but because that is not very useful knowledge to have. Some people figure it out, and they depersonalize. They start identifying with the mind itself or lose all the identification, and it doesn't seem to be a useful condition. So normally, our brain will be set up in such a way that the self thinks it's real and gets access to the language center, and we can talk to each other, and here we are, and the self is the thing that thinks that it remembers the contents of its attention. This is why we are conscious, and some people think that a simulation cannot be conscious; only a physical system can, and they got it completely backwards. A physical system cannot be conscious; only a simulation can be conscious.

consciousness is the simulated property of the stimulate itself. So, in a way, Daniel Dennett is correct. And so, yeah, keeping with what you said, yes, but the problem is philosophers like him and admire him, is very smart, very well, that works very hard. The things that he says are not wrong, but they are also not non-obvious.

Physical systems cannot be conscious, only simulations can be conscious - @SingularityFM

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