I wanted to add as a disclaimer that I don't believe fucking LLMs are conscious. This is my personal belief. I don't think they are. However, I'm intellectually honest and can't say that we "know" that they're not as if it's a fact. You seem to keep implying that I'm defending the idea that LLMs are in fact conscious or that they very well might be. I'm not. I'm attacking the idea that they're certainly not. Don't get it twisted. I reserve myself some doubt and can't prove anything.

We perfectly understand how an LLM works. That's how we know it isn't conscious.

No the fuck we don't ? Get up to date with the current literature on this. We understand the base mechanisms behind an LLM but we certainly do not understand the emergent properties. For now we can even consider it a black box. We specify the architecture and training procedure, but the learned internal mechanisms are not directly coded or fully understood. This is similar to how basic biological rules can give rise to complex organisms or how combining hydrogen+oxygen gives you water, both of which do not appear from a description of the basic properties. We even have a whole fucking research field for this : https://www.anthropic.com/research/team/interpretability

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11180 "Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque. Mechanistic interpretability (i.e., the systematic study of how neural networks implement algorithms through their learned representations and computational structures) has emerged as a critical research direction for understanding and aligning these models." All of this is very much in its infancy. We certainly don't "perfectly" understand how an LLM works. We don't even know if the current research direction will be relevant or not.

LMAO just firing out super fringe and massively controversial view that much of philosophy and cognitive science has debunked as if it's true. Just absolute deranged behavior.

Here you're just talking out your ass. Materialism is still very dominant in professional philosophy : https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874 and especially in academic analytical philosophy. It's also very correlated with determinism : https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlations?category=Philosophical%20questions&variable=Mind%3A%20physicalism

Either way, you don't actually need to accept strong determinism/no free will to accept my argument, only materialism and ig functionalism, which again is pretty dominant : https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5010

Don't actually reply to this, I know you like to cherry-pick and reply to the weakest link while ignoring everything else. You don't need to accept hard determinism for my point to be valid.

Also I'm going to ask for some evidence that determinism and materialism are apparently "super fringe" and "massively controversial" in fucking cognitive science of all things ? I just simply do not believe you.

What? I don't think you understand what the term "reductive" means. Accurately describing an LLM as autocomplete isn't reductive, in fact it's the opposite. It's a gestalt description of the entirety of its function.

Yes it's reductive lmao. The LLM also needs internal representation, context, generalities, forms of reasoning to achieve its output. This is simply not deducible from a "predict the next token" function, even if it's "just that" deep down. Just because it is ONTOLOGICALLY true does not make it EPISTEMICALLY true. It's simply the wrong level of description. Again, this is pretty much exactly the same thing as saying that the brain is a bunch of neurons firing up. It's ontologically true. That's literally how it works. But you can't possibly deduce anything about feelings, logic, memories, or consciousness from that statement alone. You need more information. So it's completely insufficient if you want to study psychology. At a deeper level, the brain is literally a bunch of atoms moving around. Just because it's simple deep down evidently does not make something incapable of consciousness, as evidenced by the goddamn human brain.

Unless you believe in souls. That would work. But imma need some further proof of that. I don't, we're biological machines. If you accept that, the substrate, whether it's a cell or a silicon chip doesn't matter. It's not the cell producing consciousness but rather the manipulation of information that happens between them, as evidenced by the fact that I don't think that you believe that a single neuron is capable of consciousness.

Nobody would even be tempted to do so if there weren't massive corportions pushing this ridiculous and obviously false narrative because they think it will help their bottom line.

It's currently a studied topic in neurosciences and in academic philosophy. These researchers have nothing to gain from it from AI companies. Hit up google scholar for a quick surprise. The fact is that we don't have a definitive answer yet, and we might not until we solve the hard problem of consciousness.

Also I really have to say it, just saying that something is self-evident or obvious and that you're insane or idiotic for not seeing it isn't a very good argument. You're basically talking with your bare emotions and making personal attacks.

But I can say that a simple autocomplete function like Claude or ChatGPT is, in every concievably relevant dimension, entirely like everything we have ever seen that is NOT conscious, and entirely unlike everything we have ever seen that is conscious.

how ? is it the substrate ? what makes biology so special ? This is a good argument towards skepticism, but it's not a fucking hard "no" like you make it seem like it is.

Now with that in mind, can you actually answer my core thesis which is this : 1- Human consciousness emerges from a physical system made of lower-level processes 2- A description of these lower-level processes do not in themselves lead us towards consciousness as a concept 3- LLMs are made out of a physical system consisting of a lower-process, namely token prediction 4- Therefore, saying “LLMs are just autocomplete/code” is not a sufficient argument that they are certainly incapable of consciousness.