Practitioner dissects Yudkowsky's argument that LLMs are conscious
JoshPurtell · x · 2026-10-04
Josh Purtell pushes back on Yudkowsky's argument that LLMs are conscious, summarizing it as: functionalism, cognition's complexity being a superset of consciousness's, math as an upper bound on cognition — hence LLMs are conscious. Purtell argues the flaw is that most people lack any sense of scale for what fits on a GPU computationally, so they fall back on bad outcome-level heuristics like "if it completes a proof, it must be complex enough."
Related event: AI Researchers Clash Over Whether LLMs Could Be Conscious(14 posts)→
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