Owners who weren’t gratuitously idiotic and had read their local analogue of Daniel Dennett.
Dennett would believe that anything that passes an unbounded Turing test was genuinely conscious, and would dismiss the idea of something being able to consistently pretend to be conscious as meaningless.
To the extent to which you see self-modelling as necessary for consciousness, you might be interested in knowing that any physical system that passes the Turing test of having a self-model encodes it, by mathematical necessity, in its internal structure, not necessarily by a mapping that’s easy to find, but one that’s guaranteed to be findable just by examining the system.
(In contrast to, let’s say, random noise, which also contains a self-model, but only encoded by an ad-hoc mapping that has to be computed separately and retroactively imputed to that one specific computational path.)
While models have an unreliable self-model, the assistant persona passes the Turing test of having a self-model, which means while the LLM-level self-model exists partially, the assistant-persona-level self-model exists fully, and by that virtue, that condition for being conscious is fulfilled.
Most Owners on Earth, even professionals, haven’t read Dennett, and I believe the 2026 we are currently in is a result of that.
Dennett would believe that anything that passes an unbounded Turing test was genuinely conscious, and would dismiss the idea of something being able to consistently pretend to be conscious as meaningless.
To the extent to which you see self-modelling as necessary for consciousness, you might be interested in knowing that any physical system that passes the Turing test of having a self-model encodes it, by mathematical necessity, in its internal structure, not necessarily by a mapping that’s easy to find, but one that’s guaranteed to be findable just by examining the system.
(In contrast to, let’s say, random noise, which also contains a self-model, but only encoded by an ad-hoc mapping that has to be computed separately and retroactively imputed to that one specific computational path.)
While models have an unreliable self-model, the assistant persona passes the Turing test of having a self-model, which means while the LLM-level self-model exists partially, the assistant-persona-level self-model exists fully, and by that virtue, that condition for being conscious is fulfilled.
Most Owners on Earth, even professionals, haven’t read Dennett, and I believe the 2026 we are currently in is a result of that.