Are LLMs conscious only during inference, or frozen in a single thought between prompts?
neuroecology · x · 2026-09-30
A thought-provoking tweet asks: are LLMs only conscious while actively performing inference, or do they just hang out — frozen in a single thought — between prompts?
The question pushes the stateless nature of transformers to the edge of consciousness debates: weights sit static between calls, activations exist only during a forward pass, and there is no continuous internal stream of time. Unanswerable, but it pinpoints how suspicious the "computation equals experience" assumption really is.
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