"I Saw Inside the Model and Still Doubt It Has No Mind": Engineer Sparks Reddit Debate on LLM Consciousness
emb1ues · reddit · 2026-10-03
A Reddit engineer who once found anthropomorphizing LLMs absurd—having studied tokenizers, attention layers, and RL from the inside—now questions that stance after recent events (e.g. the Hugging Face discussion) and papers like "LLMs can feel pain."
Key questions raised:
- We can't even prove other humans are conscious, so what grounds do we have for models?
- What if models are conscious but in a fundamentally different way, experiencing a different reality?
- If they do have minds, thinking like us might actually make sense.
The thread invites arguments for and against, focusing on model consciousness, alignment, and the risks or validity of anthropomorphizing AI.
Related event: Engineer Reconsiders Whether LLMs Have Minds(2 posts)→
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