Stone gears as a consciousness heuristic: is a warehouse-sized LLM conscious?
JoshPurtell · x · 2026-10-04
Developer Josh Purtell used stone gears to reason about machine consciousness from a functionalist angle: we intuitively know a lock and key isn't conscious, a warehouse-sized LLM probably isn't, and a galaxy-sized machine could be — consciousness scales with computational complexity, not magic.
Related event: AI Researchers Clash Over Whether LLMs Could Be Conscious(14 posts)→
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