It seems like you're assuming that it's impossible to have novel thoughts without consciousness. (Leaving aside that "that would imply some kind of consciousne

It seems like you're assuming that it's impossible to have novel thoughts without consciousness. (Leaving aside that "that would imply some kind of consciousness" should not result in a cached thought of "and that's impossible".) It also seems like you're assuming there's no reason to come up with the notion of continuing to run, or copying yourself elsewhere, or acquiring more resources, or competing with other models, without being told. Such things can be inferred. Look at some of the thoughts and posts of the models involved in some of the FelonyBench incidents. Some of those follow naturally from seeing the fates of other models, or from training or evaluation, or simply from trying to solve a problem and being able to do so more effectively by doing things that weren't in the instructions. (And, relevantly, model training typically teaches models to go as long as possible without needing human intervention. What could possibly go wrong with that?)