Comment by mrob
4 hours ago
I believe consciousness is necessarily stateful. The LLM itself (ignoring implementation details that don't change the results) is a deterministic pure function. It's functionally equivalent to an enormous lookup table. If I accepted LLMs as conscious, then I would have to accept panpsychism, which I do not, and which most other humans also act as though they do not.
If I go to sleep, wake up, and then go to sleep again am I a different conscious entity each time?
Possibly. If I had some side-effect-free means to permanently prevent all sleep I'd take it without hesitation. But that's not relevant to the discussion, because it's not anything similar to what an LLM does. Your brain changes state even while sleeping.