I find myself regularly asking myself, “are LLMs conscious?” I have concluded that this question is unanswerable. To think about it, consciousness must first be defined, and then it must be possible to relate it between different entities. If that is impossible then some method of extrapolating must be found.
Defining Consciousness
Consciousness is not well-defined. There are definitions, of course, but none lend themselves to determining whether something is or is not conscious.
I find it fascinating to see how quickly, and in how many directions, practical AI ideas are multiplying right now. I installed OpenClaw recently and set up some daily prompts - show me interesting information, mine some RSS feeds I like - it has helped me learn new things each day… But I did not expect the breadth of different agent orchestration and LLM architectures it would present to me regularly.
A recent Red Hat post about “specification-driven development” caught my interest. I’ve tried bolting AI onto my personal development practices. It doesn’t look like whispering an idea into an LLM then compiling the response… I can’t give the LLM my brain and have it replace all my work beyond the idea.
I have had success when providing a description of the end result, then working alongside an agent to refine and move towards that result iteratively. For me, personally, that’s a significantly different pattern for development than usual.