Consciousness as the disappearance of representation machinery: an LLM analogy
Singularitarian · x · 2026-10-28
An image post sharing a philosophical take comparing consciousness to how language models work: when you look at a tree, you're not aware of millions of neural impulses — only of the tree; the machinery of perception disappears, leaving its interpretation. Similarly, a language model breaks your sentence into tokens, triggering a cascade of computations producing representations of words, relationships, and meanings, operating on those higher-level structures without accounting for every token and activation.
The author's conjecture: consciousness, at least in part, may involve the disappearance of the machinery of representation, leaving behind an apparent encounter with reality itself.
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