Do GHOSTs dream of electric sheep?

Let me spoil the conclusion: you are a machine, an LLM is a machine, and what separates you from an LLM is surprisingly hard to define.

This post is extremely influenced by the videos of philosopher Monsieur Phi, so if you speak French and have ten hours to dedicate to it, go watch this playlist

Consciousness

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I regularly see Bluesky threads of people dunking on anyone suggesting LLMs might be conscious.

What I think those people don’t understand, is that the people that don’t make the argument that “LLMs are sentient beings”. They make the argument that consciousness is a term that we never managed to define and test empirically.

To make it extremely short, the scientific consensus on observing consciousness was:

1. Dualism

   Plato → Descartes

   Consciousness tied to soul or immaterial mind

   Early theories often treated consciousness as something non-physical. This view lost ground not because growing evidence showed brain damage, drugs, and stimulation alter the mind, while dualism never gave a clear account of how a non-physical mind interacts with the brain.
2. Introspectionism

   late 19th c.

   Wundt, Titchener

   Consciousness was studied through structured first-person reports. This was an attempt to make consciousness scientific, but it ran into a major problem: introspective reports were difficult to verify, standardize, or reproduce across observers.
3. Behaviorism

   early–mid 20th c.

   Watson, Skinner

   Behaviorism responded by focusing only on observable behavior and treating inner experience as scientifically unhelpful. That improved rigor, but at the cost of largely dropping consciousness itself from the explanation.
4. Global Workspace Theory

   1970s–1988+

   Baars, later Dehaene

   GWT proposes that a mental content is conscious when it becomes globally available to many cognitive systems—memory, report, decision-making, attention, and control. This explains access and reportability better than older theories, but many argue it still does not fully explain subjective feeling itself.

As you can see, in a few thousands years, we still have not found a clear way to assess if someone, or something, is “conscious”. We tried. We tried damn hard. But it always end up missing the mark.

And LLMs passes most tests we imagined so far:

• If we posit a soul is immaterial and impossible to observe, we can’t make a definitive statement an LLM does not have one
• It can display introspection through its “reasoning” blocks
• It can mimic human behaviour extremely efficiently
• LLMs have multiple layers of weights that move information forward, re-using the information deeply into its “subsystems”. In a given context window, an LLM has full global access to the available information.

But this does not mean they are conscious. It means we are not able to define what consciousness is, still, despite all being able to feel it.

And the thing is that we just trust other humans to be conscious beings. We expect their brains to work like ours.

Which is also a complete fantasy: I’m autistic and have light aphantasia, so chances are the way I experience consciousness is extremely different from yours.

Humanity

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The truth is shockingly simple: we are machines. We are extremely advanced biological machines with the most efficient processing unit in the history of the universe: the brain.

We are deterministic, entirely physical beings. There is no soul. There is no higher plane of existence.

This is why it is so hard to create a hard rule or test that would separate us from other machines. We are simply one of them.

While it might sound extreme, it’s also rational and in line with what we know and have been able to prove so far.

I also find it beautiful: we are machines so complex that even after millennia of existence, we still don’t understand how we even work. And while our exact behaviour at the microscopic level might be deterministic, our systems are so complex that they are often indistinguishable from randomness.

Just revel in the fact that you know you are human, because there is no way to prove it. You just have to believe it!

In short

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I think we all clearly understand that an LLM is not human, or even conscious.

But I hope this short blog post made you understand why it’s so hard to say what is consciousness, which is the trait we generally use as the gatekeeper to humanity.