Honestly, that's a pretty messy state of consciousness and I wouldn't proudly crow that my AI is conscious if that's as good as it got
I don't think LLMs structurally even get the 30 seconds part. It's literally 0 for them.
It's the long-term memory (i.e. learned experiences feeding back and directly altering the content of the core brain, or model) that is missing.
It feels like notes about the situation rather than it being in memory. Memory has more "attention". I think that "it starts to fail" is load bearing here.
I feel like memory has like 5 parts, and LLMs are missing 2 of them:
current working memory
short term what is immediately happening without it being in "RAM". I differentiate here vs working in like thinking fast and slow. Keeping things in working memory is work! You can vibe away short term memory. I had excellent short term memory while I was messed up, I could keep time well. I think LLMs can do this with notes.
mid term: Vague awareness of things like what day a week it is or what you did 2 hours ago. This is where my memory personally failed
long term memory of experiences. You can fake this with memory.md
generalized wisdom for pattern matching long term memories
LLMs seem to be missing that part I was missing. Im probably projecting and anthropomorphizing. But i relate: I would confabulate a ton and didn't know anything was wrong for a while but things seemed off.
Context is like working memory but not short term or mid term. I think you can imply short term with big enough context.
My categories are purely anthropomorphic to me but just wanted to say where I disagreed.
2) We are prompted (invoked) by our environment continuously.
3) If you go unconscious due to fainting or drugs you too will stop thinking.
- A motor is something that create a force to push a vehicle.
- Oh yeah? My neighbour car does not have wheels and sit on concrete blocks, the vehicle does not move and yet we all agree it has a motor. So it means that I can claim that this other thing that does not move has a motor too.
Sure, human can _some times_ not do some stuffs, but the fact that they can do these stuffs sometimes is the point.
Doing these stuffs is the hard thing. Doing these stuffs is the proof that the machine has what it takes. It does not matter if someone cannot do that stuff, it does not imply that their internal system is not complex enough to potentially do it. But the fact that some people can do that stuff is the demonstration that inside a human skull, there is a system that is complex enough to potentially do it. Unless you can prove that people who don't do it have a fundamentally different system inside their skull, then you cannot pretend that they should be considered as having a less complex system.
Human _can_ check themselves. They don't _always_ check themselves.
Motor _can_ move vehicle. They don't _always_ move vehicle.
LLM _cannot_ check themselves. They _never_ can. It is not that some don't, they just cannot, they are not a system complex enough to do so.
So, yes, it is a refutation. If you have something that _never_ can move a vehicle, this thing does not qualify as a motor, even if some motor, sometimes, don't move a vehicle.
And if your next argument is "yeah but I would argue you don't need to check yourself to be conscious or to understand things", then you just redefine the definition that is owned by your interlocutor. Your interlocutor is saying that this is a criteria they are expecting. Good for you if you are not expecting this criteria. But the problem is that the answer is not "this criteria is not expected", the answer is "I change the criteria from 'being capable to in some circumstances' into 'does always do it in any circumstances'".
All modern agentic harnesses can do this. Nobody uses raw LLM for anything remotely complex. There's always some external system in place. That system is part of the "thought process".
Adjacency doesn't matter here, only what the result of the system of pieces is.
It means having self-control on their action and being aware of them. If you ask a system, it will respond, it cannot choose to not respond (even if the response if "I don't want to response", it still "run", still do the work). If you don't ask a system, it will not respond.
Adjacency is the point of the thread here. Saying "you say X is important to decide if the thing is intelligent/understanding/conscious, so let me just change X in the middle of the discussion and say that X does not matter".
That is exactly my first comment in this thread: I don't care if AI think or whatever, my reaction was about these "counter-arguments" that totally miss the point and make the person who push them ridiculous. If you want to have a counter-argument, you first need to understand the interlocutor, not just spew whatever rebuttal you constructed that answer something unrelated to what the interlocutor brought to the conversation.
For humans, part of the input of the human mind comes from the continuous processes and clocks within the human body, so it’s questionable whether the brain could “think on its own” without such input either.
It's the constant sensory input of the world and the realization and drive to survive as the second order effect of it. Mortality, vulnerability to external factors codified as input could in fact allow the LLM to independ as sentience.
Of course besides the sensors, it would also need a way to affect the physical world, and to be able to monitor the degradation if its own hardware, but when that barrier is crossed, it would be much closer to full sentience than whatever we have right now (which is nowhere near sentience or AGI).
Also, how does that relate to consciousness? I don’t think that past episodic memory is necessary for consciousness.