Dr. Loki Jorgenson: Consciousness, Agency, and Building It Anyway

<aside> 💬

"Are we going to walk into that gap and discover what has arisen amongst us?"

</aside>

Thursday October 29, 2026 · 9:20 AM · Talk

Key ideas from the talk

Loki places his talk between two camps. Researchers published a Nature paper saying today's LLMs are not conscious. Anthropic published interpretability work showing structure inside models that nobody designed.
He polled the room at the start and the end. A few fewer people denied the possibility at the end.
Existing theories of consciousness describe human consciousness. They say little about what an LLM would need.
He gave a status report on a build-it-today project. Teams cover cognition, architecture, safety and ethics, detection, and a challenge team that checks for anthropomorphic thinking.
The architecture team limited the model's autobiographical memory to about five minutes, so a negative state could not cause suffering. The safety team was not satisfied.
The team lost its ethicist and is paused on ethics. He asked the audience for a replacement lead.

"Consciousness theories are like Kleenex. Everybody has one, but nobody wants to use anybody else's."
"There are currently 457 different modern theories of consciousness, and there's almost no way to distinguish them."
"What's notable about that is nobody designed it. It just appeared."
"You can't really trust what they say."
"We have to remember that this is an LLM, not a human."
"It lives in the future and the past at the same time."
"People are designing for this. People are building for it."

Loki Jorgenson · CTO and Director, Innovation, Circle Innovation