@themanual4am If we want to model these “layers,” where do we start? I think it depends on what we want to model. I think of this in two ways: modeling life on Earth, and modeling cumulative constraint generation. Life on Earth came about by piling on layers of constraints, such that each new layer locks in arbitrary details in the layer below and opens a new realm of exploration above. To truly understand Earth’s intelligence, you must know that full history, and I see this as a major obstacle to making human-like AI. On the flip side, all those historical precedents are arbitrary. If you ran evolution over again, you’d get something different just by chance. So maybe what really matters is that process of adding layers? Maybe that’s what we should be modeling. I like that perspective, because I don’t think reproducing a human-like mind should be our goal, anyway. Life makes all sorts of bespoke forms that perform narrow tasks way better than a human does. We should be emulating that!