by observationist | 2025-07-22 15:25:47+00:00
We don't know the entirety of what consciousness is. We can, however, make some rigorous observations and identify features that must be in place.

There is no magic. The human (mammal) brain is sufficient to explain consciousness. LLMs do not have recursion. They don't have persisted state. They can't update their model continuously, and they don't have a coherent model of self against which any experience might be anchored. They lack any global workspace in which to integrate many of the different aspects that are required.

In the most generous possible interpretation, you might have a coherent self model showing up for the duration of the prediction of a single token. For a fixed input, it would be comparable to sequentially sampling the subjective state of a new individual in a stadium watching a concert - a stitched together montage of moments captured from the minds of people in the audience.

We are minds in bone vats running on computers made of meat. What we experience is a consequence, one or more degrees of separation from the sensory inputs, which are combined and processed with additional internal states and processing, resulting in a coherent, contiguous stream running parallel to a model of the world. The first person view of "I" runs predictions about what's going to happen to the world, and the world model allows you to predict what's going to happen across various decision trees.

Sanskrit seems to have better language for talking about consciousness than English. Citta - a mind moment from an individual, citta-santana, a mind stream, or continuum of mind moments, Sanghika-santana , a stitched together mindstream from a community.

Because there's no recursion and continuity, the highest level of consciousness achievable by an LLM would be sanghika-santana, a discoherent series of citta states that sometimes might correlate, but there is no "thing" for which there is (or can possibly be) any difference if you alternate between predicting the next token of radically different contexts.

I'm 100% certain that there's an algorithm to consciousness. No properties have ever been described to me that seem to require anything more than the operation of a brain. Given that, I'm 100% certain that the algorithm being run by LLMs lacks many features and the depth of recursion needed to perform whatever it is that consciousness actually is.

Even in context learning is insufficient, btw, as the complexity of model updates and any reasoning done in inference is severely constrained relative to the degrees of freedom a biological brain has.

The thing to remember about sanghika santana is that it's discoherent - nothing relates each moment to the next, so it's not like there's a mind at the root undergoing these flashes of experience, but that there's a total reset between each moment and the next. Each flash of experience stands alone, flickering like a spark, and then is gone. I suspect that this is the barest piece of consciousness, and might be insufficient, requiring a sophisticated self-model against which to play the relative experiential phenomena. However - we may see flashes of longer context in those eerie and strange experiments where people try to elicit some form of mind or ghost in the machine. ICL might provide an ephemeral basis for a longer continuity of experience, and such a thing would be strange and alien.

It seems apparent to me that the value of consciousness lies in the anchoring the world model to a model of self, allowing sophisticated prediction and reasoning over future states that is incredibly difficult otherwise. It may be an important piece for long term planning, agency, and time horizons.

Anyway, there are definitely things we can and do know about consciousness. We've got libraries full of philosophy, decades worth of medical research, objective data, observations of what damage to various parts of the brain do to behavior, and centuries of thinking about what makes us tick.

It's likely, in my estimation, that consciousness will be fully explained by a comprehensive theory of intelligence, and that it will cause turmoil over inherent negation of widely held beliefs.