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For one thing, I have internal state that continues to exist when I'm not responding to text input; I have some (limited) access to my own internal state and can reason about it (metacognition). So far, LLMs do not, and even when they claim they are, they are hallucinating https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

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I completely agree. LLMs only do call and response. Without the call there is no response.

Would a human born into a sensory deprivation chamber ever make a call?

Very likely a human born in sensory deprivation would not develop consciousness as we understand it. Infants deprived of socialization exhibit severe developmental impairment, and even a Romanian orphanage is a less deprived environment than an isolation chamber.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10977996/

>For one thing, I have internal state that continues to exist when I'm not responding to text input

Do you? Or do you just have memory and are run on a short loop?

Whilst all the choices you make tend to be in the grey matter, the rest of you does have internal state - mostly in your white matter.

https://scisimple.com/en/articles/2025-03-22-white-matter-a-...

>Whilst all the choices you make tend to be in the grey matter, the rest of you does have internal state - mostly in your white matter.

Yeah, but so? Does the substrate of the memory ...matter? (pun intended)

When I wrote memory above it could refer to all the state we keep, regardless if it's gray matter, white matter, the gut "second brain", etc.

As the article above attempts to show, there's no loop. Memory and state isn't static. You are always processing, evolving.

That's part of why organizational complexity is one of the underpinnings for consciousness. Because who you are is a constant evolution.

Human brains are not computers. There is no "memory" separate from the "processor". Your hippocampus is not the tape for a Turing machine. Everything about biology is complex, messy and analogue. The complexity is fractal: every neuron in your brain is different from every other one, there's further variation within individual neurons, and likely differential expression at the protein level.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11711151/

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