My favorite explanation for what consciousness is one I read in a Thousand Brains, I found it quite elegant. It posited that consciousness is a natural derivation of embodiment + memory + the ability to create reference frames (which the book lays forth as the fundamental basis by which our brains work). Essentially, the idea is that just as we create reference frames to understand the world around us, because of memory, we begin to develop one for ourselves as well. Because of this, without a more integrated memory (built into weights), it seems unlikely that LLMs might "gain" consciousness.

▲

layer8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Consciousness is moment to moment and fleeting. There are people with brain defects that don’t let them form new memories. They have no memory about what happened a minute ago in their own consciousness. Still we would say that they are conscious, even if it’s only momentary. LLMs could conceivably have something like that within their CoT/MoE loops.

▲

throwawayk7h 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

how would you build memory into the weights? and why is RAG not enough? Our hippocampus is at a bit of a distance from our frontal cortex.

	▲	moonu 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah it's a good question, I've also been thinking about harnesses and all these tacked on things we've done to add persistent memory, what makes that different, I don't know the answer, I guess that still 'feels' different than what we have, but it's hard to articulate how. As for the memory into weights thing, I meant along the lines of the Google TITANS/MIRAS papers that were released I think late last year.