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Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, explains how LLMs are quietly dismantling our deepest assumptions about consciousness:
He argues that large language models have done something philosophy and neuroscience couldn't:
"In terms of consciousness, I have to say, the idea that there's sort of something magic that goes beyond physics that leads to sort of conscious behavior, I kind of think that LLMs kind of put the final nail in that coffin."
His reasoning is that LLMs keep doing things people assumed they couldn't:
"There were all these things where it's like, oh, maybe it can't do this, but actually it does. And it's just an artificial neural net."
Wolfram then challenges a core assumption about conscious experience: the feeling that we are a single, continuous self moving through time.
"I think our notion of consciousness is a lot related to the fact that we believe in the single thread of experience that we have. It's not obvious that we should have a persistent thread of experience."
He points out that physics doesn't actually support this intuition:
"In our models of physics, we're made of different atoms of space at every successive moment of time. So the fact that we have this belief that we are somehow persistent, we have this thread of experience that extends through time, is not obvious."
Then Wolfram offers a striking origin story for consciousness itself.
@stephen_wolfram suggests it traces back to a simple evolutionary pressure: the moment animals first needed to move.
"I kind of realized that probably when animals first existed in the history of life on Earth, that's when we started needing brains. If you're a thing that doesn't have to move around, the different parts of you can be doing different kinds of things. If you're an animal, then one thing you have to do is decide, are you going to go left or are you going to go right?"
That single binary choice, he argues, may be the seed of everything we now call awareness:
"I kind of think it's a little disappointing to feel that this whole wanted thing that ends up being what we think of as consciousness might have originated in just that very simple need to decide if you are an animal that can move. You have to take all that sensory input and you have to make a definitive decision about do you go this way or that way."
The takeaway is unsettling but clarifying.
If LLMs can produce complex behavior from simple rules, then consciousness may not be a mystical add-on to physics.
It may just be what happens when a layered enough system has to make a decision.
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