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Three reasons why "AI" is not conscious and perhaps never will be
(www.nature.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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Citation needed on all of this, and even if you have citations, LLMs are deterministic, and do not learn or change over time. They can’t even be said to exist continuously since they only exist during the brief time that they’re responding to inputs, and then they disappear until the next input. I would argue that all of these things would need to change in order for them to be able to have consciousness.
They definitely are not deterministic
Yes, they are.
The two main inputs to an LLM are the prompt and a seed. Pass the same prompt and the same seed, and you get the exact same output every time.
Most commercial models automatically generate the seed using a PRNG and hide it from you by default, but with local models (and also OpenAI, via their API) you can set the seed yourself and keep it fixed.
IMO, this PRNG slight-of-hand is the largest underlying factor that helps convince confused people that LLMs are conscious or intelligent, and it’s very easy to show that’s it’s a complete illusion.
They can learn and change over time, that's just not enabled. The services that offer them want a reliable, reproducible, controllable experience. There's zero reason they can't continue to change through usage, other than it's a conscious decision not to enable that functionality.
That's why they can only be conscious when they train using new data, and run asynchronously with continual input - the same way we do.
Edit: People downvote me, and I suspect it's because they're thinking of the public facing models. I am talking about progress behind closed doors. Even some of the public facing models are gaining the ability to learn, via a mechanism being called memories. It's just a short text note that is passed into the context window of every prompt, but isn't that exactly what our short term memory is? In my view is no different. Pruning the inclusion list to include only the relevant information is the equivalent to use forgetting some information, but if it's kept in long term storage with reference links to other memories, it can be "remembered" and brought back into the current context. It's functionally the same as our own learning and thinking.
Even if we could update an LLM's weights continuously, the algorithm is still deterministic, like all computer algorithms. There is no evidence that humans are deterministic (or a "finite state machine") in any way. So I don't think such a dynamically-updating LLM could be conscious, either.
It is my personal belief that all life is deterministic. It's the only plausible explanation for instinctual behavior - like monarch butterflies returning to their breeding grounds they've never been to. Or people yawning because others yawn. These aren't conscious decisions, they're peeks at the deterministic coding that life operates upon.
I don’t think you understand what “deterministic” means.
I very much do. It means that given the same inputs to a system, you can expect the same output. I believe that to be one hundred percent the incontrovertible reality of life. The problem is it is not a testable theory, because the input includes the state of the system prior the new input. You can never recover that information, so there is no way to put it through and see if you will get that same output. Spacetime coordinates and the position of the cosmos themselves are all variables in this deterministic function, but it's still deterministic.
OK, that's great. So if I understand you correctly, it seems like you're admitting that not only do you have no empirical evidence for your position, you don't believe you'll ever be able to test it. This seems like a weak position to hold, almost akin to a faith-based religious position.
As I've said, I think the existence of instinctual behavior qualifies as empirical evidence for my theory. I don't believe it on a whim. Another example is twins, separated at birth, yet growing up to have nearly identical preferences and lives. Making choices reflecting the deterministic coding of their internal decision structure, which they largely share outside of nominal differences resulting from environment. That is rather strong evidence, I feel.
How have you ruled out other explanations for instinctual behavior? For example, there is a body of scientific work which offers evidence that instincts are passed down through genetics, a mechanism which doesn't require that the brain be deterministic. What are the scientists studying this area getting wrong?
What about twins that are separated at birth but grow up to be different? It seems that the existence of even one such pair of twins would invalidate your claims, given how fundamental this would be to the operation of the brain.
Because we're talking about the same thing in a different language. "Genetics* only mean the instructions used to build the structure of our intelligence. They're not wrong at all, our determinant nature is the result of the structure of our neurons which has a fundamental configuration predominately determined by genetics.
No, it doesn't invalidate it because the twins could be fraternal, having separate DNA, or that could have had such extreme differences in environment that it drastically changed the DNA from the shared base. Excluding those, though, and you can see the deterministic nature of life shining through.
[citation needed]
Yes, I assumed that we were only talking about identical twins.
What about identical twins who did not have extreme differences in environment but who nevertheless turn out quite different? Would you agree that even one example of such a set of twins would falsify your claim?
I'm not sure why you believe citation is needed. Are you arguing that the initial state of the brain is determined by something other than genetics?
Glad we're on the same page. If there were a significant number of such cases, it would put doubt on my theory, and I'd look for any possible causes.
Yes, it is determined by many factors, only one of which is genetics. For example, developmental temperature affects neuronal growth: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp9587
Note the very first two sentences of the introduction: "The wiring of the nervous system follows a complex genetic plan during development. However, because of stochastic processes and environmental factors, genetically identical individuals seldomly show the same phenotypic outcome."
Why “a significant number”? Why would one not be enough? It seems like what you’re saying here is “the brain is deterministic, except in particular cases when I know it’s not, and also possibly in other cases that may come up.” Why not just say you don’t know?
Regardless, aside from my specific questions here, my overall position is that it’s never correct to call the brain deterministic because we literally cannot test it to see if it is. Since there are a myriad of other possible explanations for our observations about the brain, the time to label it deterministic is when we build a time machine or whatever else we’d need to collect all of the spacetime data to test it, and not before that.
Of course factors other than genetics determine the state of the neural network, but the way in which it effects it is in turn determined by genetics. Why more than one to change my mind? Because there is plenty we don't know, and a myriad of potential explanations. I'm just surmising that we are biological automotons transitioning from state-so-state based on the culmination of inputs into the perpetually changing neutral network structure established by our genetics and shaped by the environments impact on it, which can also largely be determined by the same genetic code.
Environment and genetics are inseparable, of course, so it's "impossible" to test. I can't prove it, I'm just asserting my theory based on the known evidence. I don't "know", but I still believe my theory is correct. That's the distinction. I acknowledge I don't know, and likely never will. Same as you, right?
You've seen the same evidence, and come to a different conclusion. That's fine, but you can't prove that human intelligence is non-deterministic any more than I can prove that it is. So we'll just have to agree to disagree. I hope that you are feeling gregarious enough to concede that.
Yep, I think that ends it.
I don’t generally believe things that are untestable, and in this case you have a faith-based position, which of course is your right. But I see no evidence that it would be correct over the many possible other explanations.
Have a good one, thanks for the discussion.
A computer algorithm can absolutely be non deterministic, pick your language and run random.rand()
There is a whole class of such algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_Turing_machine
But I don't see how it makes a difference, even deterministic algorithms can produce infinite complexity, eg linear neural networks are proven to be able to compute any computable function, or the Mandelbrot set which is produced from a single recurrent statement but encodes a space of infinite complexity
Maybe your point is to say that a brain is performing a non computable function...but since your brain is computing that function..is that a counter example?
How are the numbers generated by random.rand() made?
Also, NTMs are not algorithms, they’re models of computation in theoretical computer science.
This is nonsense.
My point is that for brains, it’s not possible to recreate the exact same inputs to be able to test whether the brain produces the same output. So it’s literally not possible for brains to be deterministic.
And the earth couldn't possibly revolve around the sun.
They have completely recovered the wiring of fruit fry brains and trained models on that architecture..is a fruit fly conscious? Is a little device with all th same movement and sense capability using the fruit fly con nectome conscious
I know, and it’s an example frequently cited in these types of conversations by people who don’t understand that research.
Quite likely yes.
It might be, I’m not sure. But because (quite similarly to humans) no one has a way to recreate the inputs from the outside world to pass to such a device, we don’t know.
Though to be fair, my original claim of “it’s not possible” to recreate inputs is probably too strong — it could be possible some day, but my best understanding is that we’d need something like a time machine that allows travel to the past, at least for repeatable tests. And as far as I’m aware, most physicists today are of the opinion that time travel to the past is not possible.
Yet.
No, not ever.
That is a bold statement. It's just capturing all considerable information in a set coordinates of spacetime. How hard could it be? Very. But very hard is not impossible.
I might be confused, but it seems like you admitted in your reply to another message of mine that you won't ever be able to test this empirically. I agree. How is it not impossible, then?
I just don't think it will happen within our lifetimes, but I don't believe it's literally impossible. It may as well be, but I still think the truth we can't feasibly detect is that we're just as much deterministic machines as the computers we use. It's just a different medium for the same decision-making structure of neurons, whether physical or digital.
Artificial neural networks are quite different from biological neurons, so I reject this claim.
And ICE cars are very different from EV, but the end result is the same.
I would argue a more apt analogy is that a car is very different from an RC toy car, even though they both can drive.
You can hook computer randomness up to truly random* quantum processes with fairly simple specialized chips. Building your argument on such an easily avoided technical detail isn't wise, because the question can very easily just be asked for a computer that does have access to a source of true randomness. Then it can be nondeterministic-- so what does that have to do with its consciousness or lack thereof?
* unless the entire universe is secretly deterministic, I guess.
I know.
I'm not building my argument solely on this, but maybe I'm being unclear, so I apologize.
Let's do exactly what you propose; now we pass a seed to the LLM generated from a true hardware-based random number generator. That doesn't change anything about the LLM itself: it's still deterministic. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that a deterministic algorithm can be conscious, and I think there are other factors as well (the fact that it doesn't exist continuously, it exists for brief periods simultaneously in thousands/millions of instances at once, the fact that it is static and unchanging unless re-trained, etc) which all paint a pretty clear picture that it cannot have consciousness.
I think I covered this pretty well in my other response, so I'll leave that as the main thread and I don't expect a separate response here. But for anyone else reading this thread, tl;dr: You could construct a system using an LLM as its core that has most of these properties, and don't think you can point to the individual components of that system (like the core deterministic LLM) not meeting some set of requirements for consciousness and conclude that the overall system is not conscious. In humans it seems that either consciousness spontaneously arises from non-conscious sub-components (neurons and other stuff), or that each sub-component has some aspect of consciousness which combine to form the whole one which we know of. You can poke holes in that argument-- it doesn't prove that LLMs themselves are conscious, just implies that it may not be impossible to use one to build a conscious system, and it's much less well-integrated than a human brain would be. But I think the core of the argument is worth thinking about.