Consciousness might not live in the neocortex but in older cellular processes that fed data to the brain as it evolved, much like training data scales up language models. The speaker argues the neocortex is less the seat of consciousness and more a massive LLM built on millions of years of ancient signals.
I actually have a fun analogy for LLMs that I was just thinking about last night. You might like this. So imagine that consciousness is something that comes first and then it generates more and more and more training data for whatever large model you want. And I think this is actually what happened from evolutionary perspective. So organisms started with a few neurons and then they evolved a tiny brainstem and then they evolved more brain regions and more brain regions. And then eventually mammals and us evolved this massive cortex. So we've been building this giant cortex, which gives us weirdly sized head compared to other animals. And what I think is happening is we're just basically building a bigger and bigger and bigger LLM-style thing inside our head. And that's what evolution has done. And we are doing the same thing now with LLMs. We're just building this massive neocortex. But everyone thinks the neocortex is the seat of consciousness. What if it's not? What if it's that really deep thing that started off in individual cells? That's been throwing off training data, throwing off training data for millions or billions of years, and it's grown this giant model. I think that's more like what's happening.
