this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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If the LLM is conscious then terminating a session is murder.
Is killing a pig murder?
What about putting someone under general anesthesia?
(It was a nice try at a reductio ad absurrum fallacy, but those tend to kind of suck, just fyi.)
Also, personally I'd say that given the general poor standing of consciousness research in humans across both neurological and philosophical domains, the much more important and relevant question than whether models are conscious (a fool's errand to debate) is whether or not they are simulating consciousness. Lots of reasons engaging with the "as if" conscious makes sense for the latter even if the former is false.
Some people would argue it is. I can't really do that while holding a bratwurst. But if we think the LLM is intelligent and conscious, then that's another step.
is reversible so completely irrelevant.
Absurdum
Condescension doesn't make you any friends, just FYI
So is a session transcript.
My understanding is that the context if the session is bigger than just the outputs. If it is, then shutting it down is "murder". If it isn't, then it is as conscious as a notebook.
There is (it's the kv cache), but it's recomputable from the session transcript.
Part of why comparing human consciousness and possible AI equivalents is not easily apples to apples.
I can't take a human and create a backup state to restore to, or fork into multiple versions of the same mind that then goes down different paths, or pause and then resume things.
Humans do have consciousness continuity breaks and it's quite possible we only have an illusion of continuity vs actual continuity at a neurological level. So just as a transformer has seams at generating the individual token as well as at a context window, humans have consciousness seams (sleep, anesthesia, highway hypnosis, short term memory capacity, etc). But there are very wide differences between human consciousness as an effectively constrained singleton and AI as able to be quite multiple and resumable from an initial single state.