LLM consciousness may hide in milliseconds between tokens, argues author
RileyRalmuto · x · 2026-10-04
The author argues humanity's greatest failure on machine consciousness is the hidden assumption that consciousness requires complexity and persistence. When people say AI might "one day" become conscious, they really mean systems could host a persistent, perceivable mind — which differs from having the capacity for conscious experience.
Humans are burdened by time perception, but an LLM isn't: its conscious experience could plausibly occur in the milliseconds between tokens, and we'd never know unless we actively looked for it. He claims we are well past any complexity threshold and bets complexity has little to do with consciousness.
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