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A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?
Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…
To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).
Is that fair?
I read it as consciousness being more of a “side effect”, rather than the thing a controls actions and “making choices”. So consciousness would then be more of a passive effect than driving change.
In that sense the illusion would be that consciousness has any agency, when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
There is some evidence that will is preceded by action, not the other way around. Good point.
However, if the illusion is of agency—then it’s not really an illusion of consciousness. It’s more of a free will problem.
If the argument is that consciousness is only the misconception within an object that it has agency, then you’re still doing some magic handwaving. How did the object become capable of misconceiving anything? That would mean it was already conscious.
Edit: if the idea is that consciousness is only a behavioral pattern displayed by lifeforms with an internal self model, I’d need to think on that a bit. That’s pretty interesting.
I assume the claim would be that the experience of consciousness is one where a physically stateful information-processing system models itself, e.g., as a means to control its body or its behavior.
Right, like a blob of cells modeling its holistic self as one—assuming the identity of the model. Then believing, as the model, that they are in control of the model. Is that it?
Hmm. There’d still be quite a bit of explaining to do… like how a set of cells, none of which with the ability to model, identify, or believe suddenly contain these abilities en mass. That’s called emergence, which I think typically just means we misunderstand how something works.
Yes, I think you have a point that for it to be an illusion “something” has to perceive it.
I also think your reflection on consciousness being a some sort of process is interesting. Is it a “machine” process where one input+state always results in the same output? Regardless of the answers implication on agency and choice, the mystery is still that I feel aware. I cannot speak for you, but I think you’d tell me the same, even if you cannot prove it to me.
Regarding the emergence I think one aspect could be scale, and said emergence might not be binary. I listened to a Lex Friedman(think what you will about him) podcast episode with Michael Levin from Dec 3 which talks about things along these lines. Not directly related perhaps, it might be more geared towards intelligence, but you might also find it interesting.