> Consciousness, in Chalmers’ usage, is subjective experience: there is something it is like to be a conscious system. Still, nothing in the Transformer archite

> Consciousness, in Chalmers’ usage, is subjective experience: there is something it is like to be a conscious system. Still, nothing in the Transformer architecture or in next-word prediction shows that such an inner point of view exists. Self-reports (“I am sentient”) and fluent dialogue are weak evidence, since these models are trained on vast corpora saturated with human first-person statements. This type of verbal report works for people because it is anchored in shared biology and behavior, however, for machines, it is an echo of training data. I don't want to argue here that LLMs have consciousness, but this kind of argument annoys me because it feels like an intellectual slight of hand on its own. There is no definite way (so far) to prove that anything besides oneself has qualia or a subjective experience. So arguing that we cannot observe LLMs having subjective experience, therefore they cannot have any is cheap - you cannot observe that for animals or for the person sitting next to you either. The part that self-reports are useless and LLMs sound human because they emit sequences from human training data is correct. But the article implies some sort of fundamental distinction between machines and conscious beings that can never be crossed. And I don't see any reason to assume that.