What Is It Like to Be a Language Model? Functional Consciousness, Computational Curvature, and the Degree of Its Generalization in Autoregressive Systems
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) September 15, 2026 Victor Smirnov
The paper replaces the question whether a language model is conscious with a measurable one: which functions of consciousness a trained Transformer has generalized from human text, and how far, against the human baseline. The reduction has four steps, and they are the paper's four contributions. 1. A functional account of consciousness. Consciousness is defined as the part of an agent's...