There's so much in this post that I can only tackle little bits at a time.

The first thing that occurred to me is that the input-output model is suggestive of a "black box." Here, normally, we think of a literal box with something mysterious inside. When a brain or a computer is the box, we might think of "consciousness" or "mind" hidden inside it. Your thesis, on the other hand, suggests that consciousness is the box. Things do not go in and out of it; rather, it exists as the nexus of an exchange. Which makes me wonder if the model of input-output is the best one.

The second thing, and where I had to stop because I can't hold many thoughts at once, is about ChatGPT's statement that DQN "allows future value to propagate backward through time" (By the way, it seems remarkable that ChatGPT can use emphasis effectively). You've added that "Of course, it is not really gaining information from the future — that’s impossible, even for us." But here I have to stop and think, because ChatGPT's phrasing hints at some interesting insight into entropy. It's gaining information from possibility, and possibility concerns the future. The information it gains is not hard information about what has already happened, but it could be called "soft" information about what's likely to happen in the future, based on knowledge of what has happened already (its training dataset), and the factor of what it does next. Likewise we can gain "soft" information about the future; we can't know what will happen, but we have some knowledge about what's likely to happen if we do this or that.

I'd love to spin these thoughts into some full-blown philosophy, but I can't, so I'll just leave them as things to think about.