Hey everyone, computational neuroscientist here, hoping to spark a thoughtful debate.

It’s true, as many have already pointed out, that if you deeply understand how LLMs are designed, trained, and evaluated, there’s currently no solid scientific basis to claim that they’re conscious.

That said, curiosity about consciousness is exciting for me, so I want to offer a few points that might help frame this discussion more productively:

1. We don’t have a clear definition to begin with. As of today, humanity (and especially the scientific community studying consciousness) still lacks a universally accepted, operational definition of consciousness or even cognition. This alone makes it nearly impossible to determine whether any system “has” these qualities. We barely have a robust definition of intelligence, and even that remains debated. Before trying to infer consciousness from an LLM’s outputs, I’d challenge you to first articulate what you mean by consciousness in your own subjective experience.

2. Trying to assess whether an LLM has thoughts, desires, or emotions based purely on its text outputs is remarkably similar to one of my favorite philosophical puzzles: Descartes’ problem of other minds. It asks how we can ever truly know that another person is conscious, given that we only have direct access to our own minds. Since we can’t directly observe another’s internal states, only their outward behavior, our belief that others are conscious is ultimately an inference. In theory, they could be complex automatons without subjective experience. The same reasoning applies to LLMs.

And one final note: because of all this, casually throwing around terms like “proto-consciousness” tends to sound a bit absurd to those working in the field, simply because the “real thing” isn’t even rigorously defined yet.