The New AI Consciousness Paper

Do you consider an infant to be conscious?

Or electrons?

> A conscious textual agent would need something like a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences.

So like a Claude Code session? The code persists as symbols with stable identity. The tests provide direct feedback. Claude tracks what it wrote versus what I changed - it needs identity to distinguish its actions from mine. It forms hypotheses about what will fix the failing tests, implements them, and immediately experiences whether it was right or wrong. The terminal environment gives it exactly the "stable substrate where 'being someone' is definable" you're asking for. We missing anything?

> Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics. Even a purely symbolic mind would still need a coherent symbolic universe. And this is precisely where LLMs fall short, through no fault of their own. The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of text.

The consistency and coherence of LLM outputs, assembled from an imperfectly coherent mess of symbols is an empirical proof that the mess of symbols is in fact quite coherent.

The physical world is largely incoherent to human consciousnesses too, and we emerged just fine.

>A conscious textual agent would need something like a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences. LLMs don’t have that. They exist in a shifting cloud of possibilities with no single consistent reality to anchor self-maintaining loops. They can generate pockets of local coherence, but they can’t accumulate global coherence across time.

These exist? Companies are making billions of dollars selling persistent environments to the labs. Huge amounts of inference dollars are going into coding agents which live in persistent environments with internal dynamics. LLMs definitely can live in a world, and what this world is and whether it's persistent lie outside the LLM.

I see a lot of arguments on this website where people passionately project the term consciousness onto LLMs.

From my perspective, the disconnect you describe is one of the main reasons this term cannot be applied.

Another reason is that the argument for calling LLMs conscious arises from the perspective of thinking and reasoning grounded in language.

But in my personal experience, thinking in language is just a small emerging quality of human consciousness. It is just that the intellectuals making these arguments happen to be fully identified with the “I think therefore I am” aspect of it and not the vastness of the rest.

>The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics. Even a purely symbolic mind would still need a coherent symbolic universe.

I'm not sure what relevance that has to consciousness?

I mean you can imagine a consciousness where, you're just watching TV. (If we imagine that the video models are conscious their experience is probably a bit like that!)

If the signal wasn't coherent it would just be snow, static, TV noise. (Or in the case of a neural network probably something bizarre like DeepDream.) But there would still be a signal.

I've sometimes wondered if consciousness is something like a continuous internal narrative that naturally arises when an intelligent system experiences the world through a single source (like a body). That sounds similar to what you're saying.

Regardless, I think people tend to take consciousness a bit too seriously and my intuition is consciousness is going to have a similar fate to the heliocentric model of the universe. In other words, we'll discover that consciousness isn't really "special" just like we found out that the earth is just another planet among trillions and trillions.

Why is that any different from the utter mess of a world humans find themselves existing in?

This is a great point, but even more basic to me is that LLMs don't have identity persistence of their own. There is a very little guarantee in a web-scale distributed system that requests are being served by the same process on the same host with access to the same memory, registers, whatever it is that a software process "is" physically.

Amusingly, the creators of Pluribus lately seem to be implying they didn't intend it to be allegory about LLMs, but dynamic is similar. You can have conversations with individual bodies in the collective, but they aren't actually individuals. No person has unique individual experiences and the collective can't die unless you killed all bodies at once. New bodies born into the collective will simply assume the pre-existing collective identity and never have an individual identity of their own.

Software systems work the same way. Maybe silicon exchanging electrons can experience qualia of some sort, and maybe for whatever reason that happens when the signals encode natural language textual conversations but not anything else, but even if so, the experience would be so radically different from what embodied individuals with distinct boundaries, histories, and the possibility of death experience that analogies to our own experiences don't hold up even if the text generated is similar to what we'd say or write ourselves.

I think this story fits https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Maybe it helps to consider motivation. Humans do what we do because of emotions and an underlying unconsciousness.

An AI on the other hand is only ever motivated by a prompt. We get better results when we use feedback loops to refine output, or use better training.

One lives in an environment and is under continuous prompts due to our multiple sensory inputs.

The other only comes to life when prompted, and sits idle when a result is reached.

Both use feedback to learn and produce better results.

Could you ever possibly plug the AI consciousness into a human body and see it function? What about a robot body?

I'm trying to understand your position...

It's my belief that I can tell that a table isn't conscious. Conscious things have the ability to feel like the thing that they are, and all evidence points to subjective experience occurring in organic life only. I can imagine a table feeling like something, but I can also imagine a pink flying elephant -- it just doesn't correspond to reality.

Why suspect that something that isn't organic life can be conscious, if we have no reason to suspect it?

> Morality is a feeling

It isn't. Otherwise, the Nazis were moral. As were the Jews. But in that case, all moral truth is relative, which means absolute moral truth doesn't exist. Which means that "moral" is a synonym for "feeling" or "taste". Which it is not.

> My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality.

It is how you and I experience reality and we exist in reality, so I'm not sure how it could be anything other than congruent with reality.

> Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else.

It would be an interesting and rather useless definition of "conscious" that didn't allow for expressions of consciousness. Expression isn't required for consciousness, but many conscious observers can be in turn observed in action and their consciousness observed. Which maybe is what you are saying, just from the perspective that "sometimes you can't observe evidence for the consciousness of another"?

> Is AI conscious? I believe "yes" [...] and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong.

What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?

Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions?

...

This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often.

"Does Foo have the Bar quality?"

"Yes, but first understand that when everyone else talks about Bar, I am actually talking about Baz, or maybe I'm talking about something else entirely that even I can't nail down. Oh, and also, when I say Yes, it does not mean the opposite of No. So, good luck figuring out whatever I'm trying to say."

The word for that is supernatural

To me, the absurdity of the idea of p-zombies is why I'm convinced consciousness isn't special to humans and animals.

Can complex LLMs have subjective experience? I don't know. But I haven't heard an argument against it that's not self-referential. The hardness of the hard problem is precisely why I can't say whether or not LLMs have subjective experience..

FWIW I have gone from not understanding the problem to understanding the problem in the past couple of years because it's not trivial to casually intuit if you don't actually think about it and don't find it innately interesting and the discourse doesn't have the language to adequately express the problem, so this is probably wrong.

The stateless/timeless nature of LLMs comes from the rigid prompt-response structure. But I don't see why we cant in theory decouple the response from the prompt, and have them constantly produce a response stream from a prompt that can be adjusted asynchronously by the environment and by the LLMs themselves through the response tokens and actions therein. I think that would certainly simulate them experiencing time without the hairy questions about what time is.

Is consciousness coupled with "time flow" or specifically "cause and effect", i.e. prediction? LLMs learn to predict the next word, which teaches them more general cause and effect (required to predict next words in narratives).

As such humans cannot be conscious...

We can talk to bees, we know their language. How would you go to explain what it's like to be a human to a bee?

... and then listen to it debate whether or not mere humans are "truly conscious".

(Said with tongue firmly in cheek.)

I see this comment nearly every time consciousness is brought up here and I’m pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of contemplative practices.

Are you a practitioner who has arrived at this understanding, or is it possible you are misremembering a common contemplative “breakthrough” that the self (as separate from consciousness) is illusory, and you’re mistakenly remembering this as saying consciousness itself is illusory?

Consciousness is the only thing we can be absolutely certain does actually exist.