I get what you're saying, but it's important to also consider how evolution provides for us as well by giving us neural structures already tuned for things like recognizing faces and recognizing danger. I do wonder how much realtime danger analysis has to do with consciousness.

I'd doubt it has much of a connection. Consciousness can do many things, but generally not quickly.

Hmm. I'd say subconscious might get you away from immediate danger, but it's often a conscious decision to anticipate future danger based on past events, and this feedback loop is sometimes quite small, such as deciding which path to take while being pursued.

I'm reminded of a meme...

>Giant robot pilot looking smug Caption: I am a genius!

Picture break: >same robot pilot now looking horrified. >Caption: Oh no!

I can tell you right frigging now, the average person is trained through education to build up confidence they know what they are doing, then over the next decade plus face-checked against reality to build an aversion/paranoia matrix.

The modern world is essentially orchestrated by people who build self-sustaining support structures of specialists. We've done a great job at building co-dependent specialists, but a terrible one at building generalists.

Reinforcement learning is the thing that integrates the network across time though. In one sense, I think it's doing at least part of the job that consciousness does: mediating between memory(past) and the present.

Yes, it's just that because it's an external process, DALL-E can't go meta on it like we can. So you won't ever get "appearance of consciousness" out of a process that depends on RL, imo, because you've located part of its cognition outside its brain and made it intermittent.