Predictive Processing: Conscious when Training

Last week I started learning about theories of consciousness from the Cambridge Digital Minds course.One theory in particular that stuck in my mind is predictive processing. It says that all conscious minds have an internal world model and we are constantly taking in stimuli and predicting what comes next and we update our world model based on the outcome. The prediction error is what is used to update our neural weights and the conscious experience follows from that.A great example is that predicting what happens when we drop an apple, we’re in a constant feedback loop of receiving stimuli and making predictions of what will happen in the next moment, consciously or subconsciously.I find it pretty interesting since it has some nice analogies to LLMs, especially for training via next token prediction and having an internal world model. One interesting implication is that, if LLMs were conscious today, they would only be conscious via training.At first this felt a little inaccurate but it does make sense for a sufficiently advanced AI, it would be expected it to have a persistent memory and goals and be able to update its long-term memory based on its environment.This then got me thinking, if current LLMs were conscious whilst pre-training and post-training, when exactly would consciousness emerge? I assume that a model with randomly initial weights or unable to create grammatically correct sentences is definitely not intelligent, let alone conscious.I was thinking that it would emerge at some point in the post-training phase but that’s not necessarily true. The persona fine tuning redirects to the base LLM from simulating anything into simulate a certain assistant persona. If consciousness occurs after the fine-tuning, then the base LLM must have had the ability to simulate a conscious persona in the first place.[1]I predict that the base LLM must get the capability to simulate conscious personas somewhere within its pretraining, I assume as one of the last properti