The phrase "invisible labyrinth" describes perfectly the relationship of the self inside the complexity of the human brain. When the body tries, in drips and drops, to save the organism, parts of the resource-hungry labyrinth are taken apart like a travelling circus, to put those hands to more important work. But the circus is our mind, its sense of self is rendered by this disassembly, and then it senses no more.
Sometimes, though, returning to full consciousness, the mind is forced to fill in those existential gaps. We experience an extremely tiny simulacra of this phenomenon upon waking from deep sleep. What's really remarkable is that people tend to fill in the gaps[2] in extraordinarily similar ways. This is powerful but informal evidence that the mechanisms of consciousness might be paradoxically quite simple, perhaps nothing more than a consistent framework for the internal simulation of environments. Layer enough sims, you get an emergent evolutionary impulse to maintain internal narrative.
I'm no scientist - not even particularly clever by HN standards - but figuring this particular widget out will be the bridge to AGI. Multimodal corpus are steps in this direction, but corpus needs to be responsive for this to work.
It would be humorous, but not at all surprising, if human AGI requires both simulated sex and death. No free lunches, I suppose - you want the behavior, you have to pay these weird taxes. I believe that was Oscar Isaac's rationale for giving Eve sex stuff in Ex Machina, although it was hard to believe anything he said given that everything about his character made my skin try to crawl off my body.
[1] Apologies to "In the Walls", Book 5 of Providence by Alan Moore. Do you like H.P. Lovecraft? Do you like comic books? What are you doing reading the internet? Go read this. It's Moore's career best - I'll die on that hill - and Jacen Burrows is knocking it way way way out of the park, as well. The last book feels a little meh, an effort to tie together the other Mythos Trilogy books, which are inferior in every way. It could have done without it. But it's finding a streak of white in a perfect chocolate mousse.
[2] Barring damage, upon which the brain does REALLY crazy things to fill in the gaps. GPT4, on its best days, reminds me of talking with patients that have had some hippocampal-adjacent cerebral damage. But the human brain - and body! - has far, FAR more tricks than a text-trained 'net . .