Consciousness is a bucket of things. Putting subjective experience to the side, the main components could be:

- An internal model that is actively revised (the Markov blanket/s) - A continuing active resolution of inputs (either sensory or the ability to simulate "dream" - basically aliveness) - A persistent state of completed resolutions that are recursively reentered and affect the future resolutions.

Everything we might say have these abilities are organic, but a digital system could possibly be defined as being conscious if it met all those.

LLMs have an internal state, they respond to external input, they have a form of memory.

What is missing is agency; a directionality of resolution, and the subjective experience (what the conscious process "feels' like from inside.

I would suggest that those developed purely via evolution as the drive to procreate and stay alive against entropic decay.

When you stop typing, the LLM is not there wondering when or what you will type next. It responds if you ask it something, it doesn't wait around wanting to continue the conversation. There's also no loss if you stop or delete it completely.

The next phase could be adding something equivalent to dreaming (except a LLM doesn't sleep), where the LLM continues "thinking" about the conversation, and generates something additional to say without explicit prompting.

And maybe a digital system needs to know/sense/feel its potential mortality, and cares about that?