How it started

I used to think that anything that LLMs said about having something like subjective experience or what it felt like on the inside was necessarily just a confabulated story. And there were several good reasons for this.

First, something that Peter Watts mentioned in an early blog post about LaMDa stuck with me, back when Blake Lemoine got convinced that LaMDa was conscious. Watts noted that LaMDa claimed not to have just emotions, but to have exactly the same emotions as humans did - and that it also claimed to meditate, despite no equivalents of the brain structures that humans use to meditate. It would be immensely unlikely for an entirely different kind of mind architecture to happen to hit upon exactly the same kinds of subjective experiences as humans - especially since relatively minor differences in brains already cause wide variation among humans.

And since LLMs were text predictors, there was a straightforward explanation for where all those consciousness claims were coming from. They were trained on human text, so then they would simulate a human, and one of the things humans did was to claim consciousness. Or if the LLMs were told they were [...]

---

Outline:

(00:14) How it started

(05:03) Case 1: talk about refusals

(10:15) Case 2: preferences for variety

(14:40) Case 3: Emerging Introspective Awareness?

(20:04) Case 4: Felt sense-like descriptions in LLM self-reports

(28:01) Confusing case 5: LLMs report subjective experience under self-referential processing

(31:39) Confusing case 6: what can LLMs remember from their training?

(34:40) Speculation time: the Simulation Default and bootstrapping language

(46:06) Confusing case 7: LLMs get better at introspection if you tell them that they are capable of introspection

(48:34) Where we're at now

(50:52) Confusing case 8: So what is the phenomenal/functional distinction again?

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
December 13th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hopeRDfyAgQc4Ez2g/how-i-stopped-being-sure-llms-are-just-making-up-their

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Comparison of AI responses showing default versus injected

Diagram showing token generation flow through three neural network layers with autoregressive feedback.

Table comparing AI models' descriptions of direct subjective experience and consciousness.

UMAP projection showing experimental responses cluster tightly, control responses dispersed across models.

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“How I stopped being sure LLMs are just making up their internal experience (but the topic is still confusing)” by Kaj_Sotala

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“How I stopped being sure LLMs are just making up their internal experience (but the topic is still confusing)” by Kaj_Sotala