No case for AI consciousness: stateless transformers can't host a self, argues engineer
gerardsans · x · 2026-09-24
Gerard Sans argues that AI consciousness in current models is purely a philosophical question, not a technical one.
- Frontier models are transformers; inference is local and stateless—each output is independently conditioned on the input against a frozen corpus, with no shared state, so a self or world model cannot exist in this architecture.
- The sense of identity in chat is a curated illusion: first-person UI, a system-prompt persona, and RLHF stacked on pre-training. Change any piece and the speaker disappears.
- His bottom line: sampling is not a mind, a distribution is not a self, and any consciousness debate should start with a definition—which neither neuroscience nor philosophy has managed.
More from AGI Musings
- Gary Marcus doubles down: LLMs still lack proper world models and common sense — GaryMarcus · 2026-11-12
- Toby Ord flags major wording error in AI forecast: pacing assumptions wrongly omitted — tobyordoxford · 2026-11-12
- Investor: AI diffusion will be slowest in consumer software — Oura, Strava, Labcorp still have no real AI strategy — MartinGTobias · 2026-11-12
- On AI Progress: When Models Lag on Your Load-Bearing Skill, You Can't See Them Improving — dfrsrchtwts · 2026-11-12
- Slack's David Hoang: agents beat people on coordination, proposes 'boundary agents' — davidhoang · 2026-11-12
- CS student mourns coding flow states he'll never experience in the AI era — chrissyykat · 2026-11-12