And a decent number of people are willing to attribute conscious experience to large language models. And in fact, people are slightly more willing to do so when they’ve had more experience interacting with them.

So I think one way to think about the human drive for explanation is in terms of the motivations and emotions that drive it, and I think we’ve all had these experiences. So one side of it, we have curiosity. We really want to know why certain things happen the way they do, why they happen at all. And that’s part of what really initiates the process... See more