I believe the operational definition of consciousness that James is referring to is the mental state of wakefulness, as opposed to REM sleep (dreaming) or deep sleep. All placental mammals including humans and all marsupial mammals cycle through these 3 states.
Consciousness is the state where you store memories in the hippocampus, which has a capacity of about 10^6 bits, about a day's worth. During REM sleep, these are copied to the cerebral cortex for long term storage, about 10^9 bits. During deep sleep, the hippocampus is cleared. Long term memory is read-only except during REM sleep. LLMs are a little different. They have a context window of 10^5 to 10^6 bits and a read-only long term memory of 10^11 to 10^13 bits. A public LLM does not dream because that would leak private data between users. Instead the context window is stored locally or deleted. A private LLM could update its weights from the context window. Are babies conscious? You probably don't remember anything before age 3 even though you were learning to walk and to speak and understand simple sentences. Babies lack episodic memories, which are memories associated with a time and location. The hippocampus maintains a map, which does not form until after age 3. People whose hippocampus has been destroyed by Alzheimer's disease are unable to form new memories lasting more than a few minutes even though they are awake. Are they conscious? I think we can reasonably argue that LLMs meet the operational definition of consciousness, whether or not babies and Alzheimer's patients are. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Mon, Oct 12, 2026, 5:32 AM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > There are numerous definitions of consciousness, e.g., IIT. It's > non-constructivist to knock the scientific method and scientists. Instead, > develop the science. > > Perspective: Penrose's latest thoughts and some of the proposed theory on > local consciousness and the Penrose/Hameroff Orch-OR theory are fully > supported via empirical evidence by Marx/Gilon dating back from 2012. > Connect the dots. > > Last, Hameroff's ongoing empirical research on states of consciousness, > incl. subconsciousness and unconsciousness hold merit too. > > Put your operational definition of consciousness to the public test; > publish it here. > > On Mon, 12 Oct 2026, 00:27 John Rose via AGI, <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> We've discusses Orch OR many times on this list as it was developing. >> >> What’s just as interesting about remote viewing IMO isn’t people doing it >> and the theories but why it has been suppressed. One reason, science >> couldn’t explain it therefore it’s impossible? Ridiculous. The other >> reasons are conspiritorial. >> >> On Sunday, October 11, 2026, at 3:41 PM, James Bowery wrote: >> >> It was probably a bad idea to post a video to a popular science >> story since people are really afraid of addressing the fact that there is >> an operational definition of consciousness. They'll latch onto any excuse >> to avoid facing that fact. Such "New Scientist" popularizations >> provide them plenty of material to work with. >> >> >> *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-Mfac8be6532cd6b957fc05b6d> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-M1e74a9ea8d30db315705c96a Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
