Comment by applfanboysbgon

This perspective that consciousness cannot be programmed can only make sense if you're a dualist. We don't know how consciousness arises. If you're a naturalist it can't be ruled out based on the simplicity of the algorithm.

If you say so.

> When you write a program to predict tokens based on context, seeding its context with something that makes it predict "self-reflecting" text is trivial. Program does what it is programmed to do. Would observing the output of the following program inspire doubt as to its sentience?

Then you follow it up with print statements as if that is a good analogy.

As I said, they are not programmed, so your question above is not relevant to your argument.

You say they're programs that are stochastically jiggled, but that's simply not accurate either. All LLM abilities are emergent, even when the training corpus is well defined.

I didn't think you literally thought they were made of print statements, but you are implying they're software that's been "fuzzed". Hopefully you don't literally that either and you're just using it as a bad analogy.

You could have argued from the stance of neural networks being universal functions, which might at least be closer to the truth, but instead your example is print statements!

I get you're trying to say that something trained to say a thing doesn't mean it has arrived at the thing like a mind would, and perhaps that would have been closer for GPT 2.

These days though, we just have so much more awareness of what they're actually doing internally that it's bizarre to even compare them to stochastic parrots of the training corpus, if that is closer to what you're implying.

For example: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...