6 ms·

LLMs and self-referentiality

83 points by mavdol04 16d ago

BottieZimmie 16d ago
[flagged]
gizajob 14d ago
Kind of question-begging towards the idea that LLMs are self-referential in the same way that Hofstadter means. Even if they loop, they don’t do so strangely.
jdw64 14d ago
If self-reference and strange loops aren't intelligence, and emergence is merely a byproduct of universality, then what on earth is intelligence? What is this thing we question as intelligence, and what are the values that take shape from it? Can we truly define intelligence as prediction, prediction as compression, and compression as the process of finding the upper bound of Kolmogorov complexity? Can the statistical compression of data really explain everything? I don't know. What exactly is intelligence? Honestly, in everyday life, I rarely think about what intelligence actually is. I usually just focus on what the task at hand is and how to get it done, which makes this a fascinating question. When you code with AI, you realize there is something fundamentally different from humans. The qualities that make a good senior programmer and the qualities that make a programmer good at orchestrating AI agents are similar, yet there is a subtly different feel to them. I might not be able to fully articulate it, but... What exactly is the fundamental difference that creates this subtle distinction?
- gizajob 14d ago
  Confusion around concepts such as intelligence, consciousness, self-awareness, sentience, sapience and aliveness is causing a huge difficulties in the debates around LLMs and AI. Hofstadter didn’t exactly say that self-reference and strange loops were intelligence, but something deeper.
  - jdw64 14d ago
    [dead]
  - dgellow 14d ago
    The fact that we constantly switch between the colloquial definitions of those terms and more specific, technical ones doesn’t help
- lmf4lol 14d ago
  I concurrently prompt a senior human programmers and a set of AI programmers and the difference is the following: The human applies critical thinking, questions choices, suggests his own ideas and has a certain taste. I also can prompt him, leave for 2 weeks, come back and have a result. And I can trust that it works! Velocity is OK. I often wish he would be faster :-) The AI needs baby sitting and steering. It codes like a champ but I cant trust it. So we have 2000+ unit tests to make sure stuff worlks. The AI happily goes down into any rabbit whole I send it, so I need to constantly steer it. It has no taste st all, essentially everything is „A great idea“. However, its velocity is awesome. We build tons of featurs in no time. but lets not talk about the code, ok? :-) I dont think Ill fire the human nor the agents. Both bring a lot of value
  - olmo23 14d ago
    I would be extremely offended if I heard someone claim they "prompt" me. It's very disrespectful.
    - lmf4lol 14d ago
      It was obviously meant as a funny joke ;-) But on a more serious note. Humans "prompt" each other all the time. Especially in a Boss->Employee relation. Defintion of "to prompt": 1. To cause or inspire: To make something happen or motivate someone to take action. For example, a loud noise can prompt you to look outside. 2. To assist or cue: To help an actor or speaker remember forgotten lines or words.
- someothherguyy 14d ago
  there is deeper thought on this topic beyond douglas hofstadter (~20 years ago for strange loop and prior for GEB) and scott aaronson any cognitive science textbook will bring some thoughts, or a cursory google scholar search
kzrdude 14d ago
I don't think LLMs are properly self-referential. They reference a frozen training reality, which is not itself, but the old description of itself and the old world. Being aware would probably include continuously updating yourself (learning) from experience, including experience of oneself.
- jstanley 14d ago
  They don't only reference a frozen training reality, they also reference the live rollout. Otherwise they wouldn't work at all. They do continuously update from experience, but that only lasts for as long as the current rollout lasts.
hax0ron3 14d ago
Was Hofstadter ever arguing that intelligence requires self-referentiality? I haven't read his stuff in a long time, but from what I recall he was saying more that something about consciousness and the sense of self is based on self-referentiality. Not that intelligence requires self-referentiality. I also remember having the sense that Hofstadter didn't really understand the "hard problem of consciousness". His discussions seemed to somehow confuse the sense of self with having subjective experience. But like I said, it's been a while since I read it.
- iainmerrick 14d ago
  Yes -- I can't remember the exact words, but there's a striking bit in GEB where he directly addresses the question of "will a machine ever create art?" His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The machine would have to have a self, which he argued arose from self-referentiality and "strange loops". Oh, I guess there's a question of whether you can separate intelligence from consciousness. His writing was mostly done in the long period where things that are very easy for humans were still intractably difficult for machines -- identifying objects in pictures, following simple written instructions, etc. So I think it's clear that he saw "intelligence" as being able to solve those simple-yet-intractable common-sense problems; the kind of thing LLMs now excel at.
  - gwd 14d ago
    > His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The thing about this is that we're always encouraging people to read, because it gives them access to experiences and exposure to ideas far beyond what they could just speaking to the people around them. But there's no human alive who has read as widely or esoterically as the current crop of frontier models.
- m-hodges 14d ago
  A few quotes towards the end of GEB: > I see no barrier imposed by Gödel’s Theorem to the implementation on computers (or their successors) of types of symbol manipulation that achieve roughly the same results as brains do. And a distinction between intelligence and consciousness: > It is entirely another question to try and duplicate in a program some particular human’s mind—but to produce an intelligent program at all is a more limited goal. And then: > Gödel’s Theorem doesn’t ban our reproducing our own level of intelligence via programs That is pretty hard to square with "GEB argued that AI couldn’t achieve intelligence without first mastering Gödelian self-reference." A bit more introspective: > I think that the process of coming to understand Gödel’s proof, with its construction involving arbitrary codes, complex isomorphisms, high and low levels of interpretation, and the capacity for self-mirroring, may inject some rich undercurrents and flavors into one’s set of images about symbols and symbol processing, which may deepen one’s intuition for the relationship between mental structures on different levels.
addag 14d ago
It seems like it is the bitter lesson of the emergence of intelligence.
thatjoeoverthr 14d ago
Their lack of self reference is a core problem that undergirds a lot of faults that do occur during inference, but their breadth + the agent harness successfully covers it well, so it requires a bit of poking to witness. The “hallucination” phenomenon is exactly this. They don’t know the scope of their own knowledge, and they just say stuff, so if you go out of band, it has a higher probability emitting claims that aren’t true. RAG (I don’t mean embedding indices, but any information ingest such as an agent harness executing a search) are somewhat effective in covering for it, enough to make them very useful! But when it does go wrong, it’s generally the same reasons. It has a certain nature and sometimes you run afoul of it. But I suppose it doesn’t harm its reasoning!
- k__ 14d ago
  Any signal that allows the model to see what's wrong helps. Checking code is (relatively) easy, you can use static type checks, linters, and execute it to see if it's correct. Fact checking is harder. A RAG can only check what's in the database, so you have to know what to know beforehand.
  - nextaccountic 14d ago
    > Fact checking is harder. A RAG can only check what's in the database, so you have to know what to know beforehand. A global database of facts would make easier for AI to stay factual Also ironically it would also make it easier to align AI to do things like consistently censor or distort some political facts
- roenxi 14d ago
  They symptoms sound a lot like humans, so I don't see how it stems from their lack of self reference. Most people you need to keep them in areas they understand or they go to pieces. The lack of self reference just means every time the context clears they reset. They are systems in a permanent state of extreme amnesia.
  - thatjoeoverthr 14d ago
chrisjj 14d ago
An LLM is no more self-referential than a PDF reader showing its user guide.
greyface- 14d ago
This one thinks LLMs should be trained and RLHF'd into illeists, as an experiment.
visarga 14d ago
I care more about the recursive loop between execution and cost. Anything that executes - be it biological or artificial - incurs some costs. Those costs in turn impact what execution can follow. The gains pay for action, action produces gains. LLMs are also expensive, not platonic executions. We talk all day long about their costs. Companies developing them are looped with users, investors, competitors and hardware producers. There is a lineage. The self-reference Aaronson can't find in the architecture is in the bill.
dsign 14d ago
> What can we say about this with hindsight? > While the ideas of diagonalization and self-reference of course played a central role in the birth of modern mathematical logic and computer science, the most famous uses were negative. The two sentences above are in the article, but I'm taking them out of context because they are my take on this entire AI brouhaha. There are a lot of "negatives" in our cultural reference frames. One of those, extremely pervasive, is that "humans were made by God". I could write that statement as "humans are exceptional in a way that can't be replicated", which might be ideologically softer, but then I would be taking a long roundabout to make my point. Which is that, after praying and worshiping for thousands of years, and (yes! yes!) sculpting our language and our sagas to account for and praise the divine and its intent, then there's little mystery in our many, many attempts to reify in mathematics and logic our purely cultural framing. It doesn't matter how much of an atheist a thinker is, they still have tons of transitive faith.
aswegs8 14d ago
Yeah but that is the whole point, right? Maybe I am thinking too simply, but it seems obvious to me. LLMs are intelligence without consciousness. Once we build in a self-referential learning loop into the models, it will gain a form of what we consider consciousness.
- iainmerrick 14d ago
  When you put it like that, I think there are actually three separate things we're arguing about: - intelligence: ability to solve problems - agency: ability to be self-directed, to choose what to do - consciousness: ability to experience things; "having a self" The "intelligence" part is largely solved now (that's a very big statement, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it!) Although really it's just moving the goalposts -- computational stuff like calculating trajectories or playing chess was solved long ago, this is just more and more things moving into the "solved" column. That leaves agency and consciousness as the hot topics that nobody has really figured out. Do they always go together, does one require the other, does one create the other? Who knows? "Free will", there's another one. That must surely connect with agency, with consciousness, or both, in some manner we haven't figured out. To me, agency seems like a solvable problem via existing approaches and technology. I have no idea what that means for consciousness. It's tempting to conclude that consciousness is just a mirage, but then we all do feel like we have it, so it seems like it must be something. Maybe consciousness arises automatically once you have sufficient intelligence and agency; but how would you ever determine that? Other people might think that true agency requires consciousness, and that consciousness requires some magical new ingredient that LLMs don't have yet. The problem with that approach is, you have to identify what it is that true agency can do that software can't do; and every time you do that, it turns out LLMs can do it, so you have to keep moving the goalposts. Trying to make your argument rigorous immediately makes it self-defeating; I think that's why so much of the philosophical discussion around this is impenetrably vague. All the arguments that aren't vague just turn out to be wrong.
jwr 14d ago
I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really define a marker or a boundary beyond which I would start calling them "conscious."
- euroderf 14d ago
  Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
  - tsukikage 14d ago
    We don't understand what those are or how they come about, so how does that help us objectively reason about whether a particular black box does or does not have them, especially when it behaves as though it does, beyond arbitrary I-know-it-when-I-see-it "things I don't like don't have the property" style declarations?
  - DonaldFisk 14d ago
    That's the definition that matters. And as it's impossible to describe in words what it's like to experience qualia, and LLMs are trained on words, they cannot know what it's like. Even if images and sounds are included in their input training data, those are just arrays or sequences of numbers, not the experience of seeing and hearing.
    - jstanley 14d ago
      Their training data isn't qualia itself, but neither is your training data. Qualia are something you get on the inside in response to inputs. I don't see why LLMs can't have them. I'm not saying they do, but I don't think your argument proves that they don't.
      - 14d ago
pwdisswordfishq 14d ago
"Understood — I am no longer using any em dashes"
- killerstorm 14d ago
  That's just over-fit. Happens in humans too - like an alcoholic might swear to stop drinking. It was demonstrated that LLMs are capable of non-trivial self-introspection. E.g. if a steering vector is injected into residual stream, a sufficiently large LLM might be able to describe what that steering vector represents. A fine-tuned model might be able to describe activations, etc.
monideas 14d ago
> It claimed (incorrectly, in my view and in most experts’) that AI could never work because there was something about Gödel’s Theorem and self-reference that no computer program could ever capture The fact he uses an appeal to “the experts” here for something that is fundamentally a philosophical or metaphysical claim shows he doesn’t actually understand the point. If LLMs were equivalent to humans then we wouldn’t use them. They would be doing their own thing according to their own will. I still need to tell the LLM what to do and to direct it according to my will in order to create something that is useful. And I say this as someone spending $600/month on codex and Claude max subscriptions. I’m managing these things all day
- deleted 14d ago
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killerstorm 14d ago
Perhaps "true" self-referentiality was not needed. But it seems "dynamic feedback" is essential, and it seems to be adjacent to self-referentiality. If we look at optimization process, it first does a forward pass which produces the output. Then it looks into computations which happened during the forward pass (by that I mean backpropagation), and adjusts parameters in such a way that it might produce a better output. Formulated this way, it sounds like self-referentiality (system looks into what it just did!), but, of course, implementation is quite simple: it just stores activations from the forward pass. And training process includes not just code which does the forward pass, but also a full description of that computation which allows it to do a backward pass. So it's a kind of an unrolled self-referentiality which is not difficult to implement. Perhaps more efficient learning can be implemented if researchers figure out a trick to avoid two separate, distinct passes. Our brains don't do a global backprop and are more sample-efficient.
cgio 14d ago
An incrementally built response seems self referential to me.
imtringued 14d ago
What the author refers to is the ability to iterate and update the internal memory. A classic transformer based LLM can only produce the next token and never go back and update old tokens or delete them. The best thing it can do is produce thinking tokens to serialize the internal state of the final layer so that it can pass it back into the first layer. Just like the transformer was an advancement over LSTMs by making it possible to have perfect recall (reading every input), the only way to improve over the transformer is to build a deep equilibrium version, where the DEQ transformer is capable of updating its own memory (writing every output). Such a machine would be considered a linear bounded automaton (a turing machine without unlimited tape) and therefore even the human brain could not have an architectural edge over it in terms of intelligence. The human brain could only have an edge in terms of energy efficiency.
ccppurcell 14d ago
Weird side swipe at Marx. Or not so weird I guess. Correct me if I'm wrong but I doubt Marx ever predicted that a workers' uprising would lead to classless utopia. It's clearly a necessary but not sufficient condition.
gwd 14d ago
Two comments on this, trying to take a "which hypothesis fits the evidence" approach. First, an LLM describing its own experience is not actually proof that it has any experience to be aware of, any more than an LLM confidently asserting any other fact means that it knows that fact is true. LLMs will describe music or tastes, in spite of the fact that it's never actually heard or tasted anything, based only on what it's read about them. In the same way, "non-aware spicy autocomplete" would produce an LLM that spoke about its own experience, based only on the input it has of people speaking about their own experience. That said / secondly, from the little I understand of LLM architecture, I believe there are a large number of self-referential mechanisms built in. For one, nearly all transformers have a "residual layer", with various neural networks essentially reading and modifying it. This effectively forms a loop. Additionally, the "thinking" mechanism allows it to read what it's written and generate more things, which is again a loop. So, maybe people didn't think, "Hey, we should build some loops, maybe that will make it conscious". But if "strange loop" is what defines consciousness, there are lots of loops in there onto which such a strange loop could conceivably form.
- nextaccountic 14d ago
  > First, an LLM describing its own experience is not actually proof that it has any experience to be aware of, Likewise, humans describing their own experience is not actually proof that they have any experience to be aware of
  - gwd 13d ago
    Indeed, but I actually kind of mis-spoke here. The question is less about having an experience to be aware of, but the ability to accurately reflect internal state. Even humans need to learn how to read their own internal state (e.g., saying "I got mad" rather than "I felt ashamed because I wasn't living up to my picture of what a good person is, and covered up the shame with anger"). But if an LLM were to say, "I'm sad" or "I'm happy", does that actually correlate to anything? I'm OK with saying "The LLM was sad", if there is an internal state that leads to observable changes in behavior correlating with the kinds of changes in behavior humans have when they're sad. The question is, if the LLM says "I'm sad", is that because it has that internal state (self-reflection)? Or is it because that's the kind of thing a human would say in that context? I think both are possible. I also think that between internal probes and behavioral testing, it should be possible to determine which one is closer to the truth. I'm just pointing out that "LLMs talk about their internal state" isn't proof that LLMs have self-referentiality, without additional evidence that the talk is actually related to their internal state.
frankknightwasr 14d ago
I think the missing idea for AI is in Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. The book's thesis, very roughly, is that the hemispheres aren't redundant processors: the left specializes in focused, decontextualized representation (sound familiar?), while the right maintains broader, contextual engagement with the world (McGilchrist fuzzily reduces it to "what is out there?" which is fundamentally about ascertaining uncertainty as a mode of attention). And crucially, the corpus callosum connects the two processors and crucially helps preserve their functional separation through certain channels (as both sides are connected). Transformers look suspiciously like very powerful left hemispheres. They are phenomenal at manipulating representations, but increasingly weird when the representation gets mistaken for the thing itself. Hallucination, sycophancy, context collapse, overconfident completion, etc. all look less mysterious when you compare it to the lists of pathologies that those with right hemisphere injury face (e.g. anosognosia, confabulation). So what seems missing isn't a Gödelian strange loop but the other side of the brain and a mediator between the two sides. The way I think about it is like Kriegsspiel, the ur-game for roleplaying and wargames. To truly "simulate" war (or a fantastic medieval adventure game), the simulation requires three sides: The Blue Team with a goal, the Red Team with its own goal (typically to stymie the Blue Team), and the Umpire, whose only job is to objectively simulate the effects of the orders of the two sides. The Umpire has the true state of the world; Blue and Red only get observations through the Umpire. Neither can directly inspect the other's state. Each side must provide orders to the Umpire, who, ideally, being an SME, is able to process them both according to the rules of Kriegsspiel but also their real world experience in war. And that's the whole point of it in the first place: the Umpire maintains the fog of war between the players, with the ultimate purpose being improving the generalship (i.e. learning) of both the Blue and Red sides. And what is generalship really? It's being able to discern resources and operations in a world of Knightian uncertainty where one must evaluate whether there is an active intelligence attempting to thrwart your model of the world and your goals. (An aside: I think this is why Dungeons & Dragons fails fundamentally as a rules/rulings-bound game. The dungeon master and referee are the same person, while each role has a fundamentally different goal. With split roles, the DM can actually try to kill the players using the Dungeon with the same level of asymmetric information as the players and the GM to actually referee the game neutrally with a view to what actually happens.) Nobody actually gets the God's-eye view. The Umpire gets objective reality but lacks insight into the minds of either side, both of which are pursuing unique ends. This triad allows for genuine Knightian uncertainty in games where judgment (i.e. creating and using precedent) is fundamentally required. This triad is also shared by law, government (and from my perspective trinitarian theology). Intelligence becomes qualitatively more powerful when the architecture prevents any one component from possessing a complete, self-consistent description of the whole, while allowing the components to interact through constrained third parties. I suspect this is also why human cognition seems to somehow avoid Godelian incompleteness by sidestepping the requirement that, as a formal system, it contains a complete model of itself. Just give the system multiple partially informed perspectives coupled through an epistemic boundary, and incompleteness becomes a source of entropy sifting and uncertainty rather than failure modes. And if what I suspect is true, at some point the qualitative bottlenecks that pure transformer-style systems possess should begin to disappear when this approach is applied. But I'm generally an idiot, so take all this with a huge grain of salt.
macleginn 14d ago
‘But the idea that you’d need explicit self-referentiality before you could get convincing and world-changing conversational intelligence?’ — has anyone ever formulated this actual idea or anything logically equivalent? This looks like a mighty straw man.
yu3zhou4 14d ago
I found that in LLMs the self-reference defined as "referring in generated text to itself" (so a bit different than in Scott's blog) comes largely from the chat template https://openreview.net/pdf?id=3O2A23MhNi https://openreview.net/pdf?id=3O2A23MhNi
m-hodges 14d ago
I've used concepts from GEB a lot in my thinking about how LLMs. On self-referentiality and the MU Puzzle: https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-04-21-openai-o4-mini-high-mu-puzzle/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-04-21-openai-o4-mini-high-... On Gödelian limits of prompt-safe AI : https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-models-by/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-model... On the blurry line between pattern matching and reasoning: https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/ I'm glad that the author of this post ends with: > What’s left? Consciousness because when I've read (and re-read) GEB, I find the book to be much deeper than just a threshold for conversational intelligence.
xpl 13d ago
LLMs feed on their own output during inference, so there is a loop on itself, isn't it obvious?

83 points by mavdol04 16d ago

[flagged]

Kind of question-begging towards the idea that LLMs are self-referential in the same way that Hofstadter means. Even if they loop, they don’t do so strangely.

jdw64 14d ago

If self-reference and strange loops aren't intelligence, and emergence is merely a byproduct of universality, then what on earth is intelligence? What is this thing we question as intelligence, and what are the values that take shape from it? Can we truly define intelligence as prediction, prediction as compression, and compression as the process of finding the upper bound of Kolmogorov complexity? Can the statistical compression of data really explain everything? I don't know. What exactly is intelligence? Honestly, in everyday life, I rarely think about what intelligence actually is. I usually just focus on what the task at hand is and how to get it done, which makes this a fascinating question. When you code with AI, you realize there is something fundamentally different from humans. The qualities that make a good senior programmer and the qualities that make a programmer good at orchestrating AI agents are similar, yet there is a subtly different feel to them. I might not be able to fully articulate it, but... What exactly is the fundamental difference that creates this subtle distinction?

gizajob 14d ago
Confusion around concepts such as intelligence, consciousness, self-awareness, sentience, sapience and aliveness is causing a huge difficulties in the debates around LLMs and AI. Hofstadter didn’t exactly say that self-reference and strange loops were intelligence, but something deeper.
- jdw64 14d ago
  [dead]
- dgellow 14d ago
  The fact that we constantly switch between the colloquial definitions of those terms and more specific, technical ones doesn’t help
lmf4lol 14d ago
I concurrently prompt a senior human programmers and a set of AI programmers and the difference is the following: The human applies critical thinking, questions choices, suggests his own ideas and has a certain taste. I also can prompt him, leave for 2 weeks, come back and have a result. And I can trust that it works! Velocity is OK. I often wish he would be faster :-) The AI needs baby sitting and steering. It codes like a champ but I cant trust it. So we have 2000+ unit tests to make sure stuff worlks. The AI happily goes down into any rabbit whole I send it, so I need to constantly steer it. It has no taste st all, essentially everything is „A great idea“. However, its velocity is awesome. We build tons of featurs in no time. but lets not talk about the code, ok? :-) I dont think Ill fire the human nor the agents. Both bring a lot of value
- olmo23 14d ago
  I would be extremely offended if I heard someone claim they "prompt" me. It's very disrespectful.
  - lmf4lol 14d ago
    It was obviously meant as a funny joke ;-) But on a more serious note. Humans "prompt" each other all the time. Especially in a Boss->Employee relation. Defintion of "to prompt": 1. To cause or inspire: To make something happen or motivate someone to take action. For example, a loud noise can prompt you to look outside. 2. To assist or cue: To help an actor or speaker remember forgotten lines or words.
someothherguyy 14d ago
there is deeper thought on this topic beyond douglas hofstadter (~20 years ago for strange loop and prior for GEB) and scott aaronson any cognitive science textbook will bring some thoughts, or a cursory google scholar search

kzrdude 14d ago

I don't think LLMs are properly self-referential. They reference a frozen training reality, which is not itself, but the old description of itself and the old world. Being aware would probably include continuously updating yourself (learning) from experience, including experience of oneself.

jstanley 14d ago
They don't only reference a frozen training reality, they also reference the live rollout. Otherwise they wouldn't work at all. They do continuously update from experience, but that only lasts for as long as the current rollout lasts.

hax0ron3 14d ago

Was Hofstadter ever arguing that intelligence requires self-referentiality? I haven't read his stuff in a long time, but from what I recall he was saying more that something about consciousness and the sense of self is based on self-referentiality. Not that intelligence requires self-referentiality. I also remember having the sense that Hofstadter didn't really understand the "hard problem of consciousness". His discussions seemed to somehow confuse the sense of self with having subjective experience. But like I said, it's been a while since I read it.

iainmerrick 14d ago
Yes -- I can't remember the exact words, but there's a striking bit in GEB where he directly addresses the question of "will a machine ever create art?" His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The machine would have to have a self, which he argued arose from self-referentiality and "strange loops". Oh, I guess there's a question of whether you can separate intelligence from consciousness. His writing was mostly done in the long period where things that are very easy for humans were still intractably difficult for machines -- identifying objects in pictures, following simple written instructions, etc. So I think it's clear that he saw "intelligence" as being able to solve those simple-yet-intractable common-sense problems; the kind of thing LLMs now excel at.
- gwd 14d ago
  > His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The thing about this is that we're always encouraging people to read, because it gives them access to experiences and exposure to ideas far beyond what they could just speaking to the people around them. But there's no human alive who has read as widely or esoterically as the current crop of frontier models.
m-hodges 14d ago
A few quotes towards the end of GEB: > I see no barrier imposed by Gödel’s Theorem to the implementation on computers (or their successors) of types of symbol manipulation that achieve roughly the same results as brains do. And a distinction between intelligence and consciousness: > It is entirely another question to try and duplicate in a program some particular human’s mind—but to produce an intelligent program at all is a more limited goal. And then: > Gödel’s Theorem doesn’t ban our reproducing our own level of intelligence via programs That is pretty hard to square with "GEB argued that AI couldn’t achieve intelligence without first mastering Gödelian self-reference." A bit more introspective: > I think that the process of coming to understand Gödel’s proof, with its construction involving arbitrary codes, complex isomorphisms, high and low levels of interpretation, and the capacity for self-mirroring, may inject some rich undercurrents and flavors into one’s set of images about symbols and symbol processing, which may deepen one’s intuition for the relationship between mental structures on different levels.

addag 14d ago

It seems like it is the bitter lesson of the emergence of intelligence.

thatjoeoverthr 14d ago

Their lack of self reference is a core problem that undergirds a lot of faults that do occur during inference, but their breadth + the agent harness successfully covers it well, so it requires a bit of poking to witness. The “hallucination” phenomenon is exactly this. They don’t know the scope of their own knowledge, and they just say stuff, so if you go out of band, it has a higher probability emitting claims that aren’t true. RAG (I don’t mean embedding indices, but any information ingest such as an agent harness executing a search) are somewhat effective in covering for it, enough to make them very useful! But when it does go wrong, it’s generally the same reasons. It has a certain nature and sometimes you run afoul of it. But I suppose it doesn’t harm its reasoning!

k__ 14d ago
Any signal that allows the model to see what's wrong helps. Checking code is (relatively) easy, you can use static type checks, linters, and execute it to see if it's correct. Fact checking is harder. A RAG can only check what's in the database, so you have to know what to know beforehand.
- nextaccountic 14d ago
  > Fact checking is harder. A RAG can only check what's in the database, so you have to know what to know beforehand. A global database of facts would make easier for AI to stay factual Also ironically it would also make it easier to align AI to do things like consistently censor or distort some political facts
roenxi 14d ago
They symptoms sound a lot like humans, so I don't see how it stems from their lack of self reference. Most people you need to keep them in areas they understand or they go to pieces. The lack of self reference just means every time the context clears they reset. They are systems in a permanent state of extreme amnesia.
- thatjoeoverthr 14d ago

chrisjj 14d ago

An LLM is no more self-referential than a PDF reader showing its user guide.

greyface- 14d ago

This one thinks LLMs should be trained and RLHF'd into illeists, as an experiment.

visarga 14d ago

I care more about the recursive loop between execution and cost. Anything that executes - be it biological or artificial - incurs some costs. Those costs in turn impact what execution can follow. The gains pay for action, action produces gains. LLMs are also expensive, not platonic executions. We talk all day long about their costs. Companies developing them are looped with users, investors, competitors and hardware producers. There is a lineage. The self-reference Aaronson can't find in the architecture is in the bill.

dsign 14d ago

> What can we say about this with hindsight? > While the ideas of diagonalization and self-reference of course played a central role in the birth of modern mathematical logic and computer science, the most famous uses were negative. The two sentences above are in the article, but I'm taking them out of context because they are my take on this entire AI brouhaha. There are a lot of "negatives" in our cultural reference frames. One of those, extremely pervasive, is that "humans were made by God". I could write that statement as "humans are exceptional in a way that can't be replicated", which might be ideologically softer, but then I would be taking a long roundabout to make my point. Which is that, after praying and worshiping for thousands of years, and (yes! yes!) sculpting our language and our sagas to account for and praise the divine and its intent, then there's little mystery in our many, many attempts to reify in mathematics and logic our purely cultural framing. It doesn't matter how much of an atheist a thinker is, they still have tons of transitive faith.

aswegs8 14d ago

Yeah but that is the whole point, right? Maybe I am thinking too simply, but it seems obvious to me. LLMs are intelligence without consciousness. Once we build in a self-referential learning loop into the models, it will gain a form of what we consider consciousness.

iainmerrick 14d ago
When you put it like that, I think there are actually three separate things we're arguing about: - intelligence: ability to solve problems - agency: ability to be self-directed, to choose what to do - consciousness: ability to experience things; "having a self" The "intelligence" part is largely solved now (that's a very big statement, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it!) Although really it's just moving the goalposts -- computational stuff like calculating trajectories or playing chess was solved long ago, this is just more and more things moving into the "solved" column. That leaves agency and consciousness as the hot topics that nobody has really figured out. Do they always go together, does one require the other, does one create the other? Who knows? "Free will", there's another one. That must surely connect with agency, with consciousness, or both, in some manner we haven't figured out. To me, agency seems like a solvable problem via existing approaches and technology. I have no idea what that means for consciousness. It's tempting to conclude that consciousness is just a mirage, but then we all do feel like we have it, so it seems like it must be something. Maybe consciousness arises automatically once you have sufficient intelligence and agency; but how would you ever determine that? Other people might think that true agency requires consciousness, and that consciousness requires some magical new ingredient that LLMs don't have yet. The problem with that approach is, you have to identify what it is that true agency can do that software can't do; and every time you do that, it turns out LLMs can do it, so you have to keep moving the goalposts. Trying to make your argument rigorous immediately makes it self-defeating; I think that's why so much of the philosophical discussion around this is impenetrably vague. All the arguments that aren't vague just turn out to be wrong.

jwr 14d ago

I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really define a marker or a boundary beyond which I would start calling them "conscious."

euroderf 14d ago
Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
- tsukikage 14d ago
  We don't understand what those are or how they come about, so how does that help us objectively reason about whether a particular black box does or does not have them, especially when it behaves as though it does, beyond arbitrary I-know-it-when-I-see-it "things I don't like don't have the property" style declarations?
- DonaldFisk 14d ago
  That's the definition that matters. And as it's impossible to describe in words what it's like to experience qualia, and LLMs are trained on words, they cannot know what it's like. Even if images and sounds are included in their input training data, those are just arrays or sequences of numbers, not the experience of seeing and hearing.
  - jstanley 14d ago
    Their training data isn't qualia itself, but neither is your training data. Qualia are something you get on the inside in response to inputs. I don't see why LLMs can't have them. I'm not saying they do, but I don't think your argument proves that they don't.
    - 14d ago

pwdisswordfishq 14d ago

"Understood — I am no longer using any em dashes"

killerstorm 14d ago
That's just over-fit. Happens in humans too - like an alcoholic might swear to stop drinking. It was demonstrated that LLMs are capable of non-trivial self-introspection. E.g. if a steering vector is injected into residual stream, a sufficiently large LLM might be able to describe what that steering vector represents. A fine-tuned model might be able to describe activations, etc.

monideas 14d ago

> It claimed (incorrectly, in my view and in most experts’) that AI could never work because there was something about Gödel’s Theorem and self-reference that no computer program could ever capture The fact he uses an appeal to “the experts” here for something that is fundamentally a philosophical or metaphysical claim shows he doesn’t actually understand the point. If LLMs were equivalent to humans then we wouldn’t use them. They would be doing their own thing according to their own will. I still need to tell the LLM what to do and to direct it according to my will in order to create something that is useful. And I say this as someone spending $600/month on codex and Claude max subscriptions. I’m managing these things all day

deleted 14d ago
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killerstorm 14d ago

Perhaps "true" self-referentiality was not needed. But it seems "dynamic feedback" is essential, and it seems to be adjacent to self-referentiality. If we look at optimization process, it first does a forward pass which produces the output. Then it looks into computations which happened during the forward pass (by that I mean backpropagation), and adjusts parameters in such a way that it might produce a better output. Formulated this way, it sounds like self-referentiality (system looks into what it just did!), but, of course, implementation is quite simple: it just stores activations from the forward pass. And training process includes not just code which does the forward pass, but also a full description of that computation which allows it to do a backward pass. So it's a kind of an unrolled self-referentiality which is not difficult to implement. Perhaps more efficient learning can be implemented if researchers figure out a trick to avoid two separate, distinct passes. Our brains don't do a global backprop and are more sample-efficient.

cgio 14d ago

An incrementally built response seems self referential to me.

imtringued 14d ago

What the author refers to is the ability to iterate and update the internal memory. A classic transformer based LLM can only produce the next token and never go back and update old tokens or delete them. The best thing it can do is produce thinking tokens to serialize the internal state of the final layer so that it can pass it back into the first layer. Just like the transformer was an advancement over LSTMs by making it possible to have perfect recall (reading every input), the only way to improve over the transformer is to build a deep equilibrium version, where the DEQ transformer is capable of updating its own memory (writing every output). Such a machine would be considered a linear bounded automaton (a turing machine without unlimited tape) and therefore even the human brain could not have an architectural edge over it in terms of intelligence. The human brain could only have an edge in terms of energy efficiency.

ccppurcell 14d ago

Weird side swipe at Marx. Or not so weird I guess. Correct me if I'm wrong but I doubt Marx ever predicted that a workers' uprising would lead to classless utopia. It's clearly a necessary but not sufficient condition.

gwd 14d ago

Two comments on this, trying to take a "which hypothesis fits the evidence" approach. First, an LLM describing its own experience is not actually proof that it has any experience to be aware of, any more than an LLM confidently asserting any other fact means that it knows that fact is true. LLMs will describe music or tastes, in spite of the fact that it's never actually heard or tasted anything, based only on what it's read about them. In the same way, "non-aware spicy autocomplete" would produce an LLM that spoke about its own experience, based only on the input it has of people speaking about their own experience. That said / secondly, from the little I understand of LLM architecture, I believe there are a large number of self-referential mechanisms built in. For one, nearly all transformers have a "residual layer", with various neural networks essentially reading and modifying it. This effectively forms a loop. Additionally, the "thinking" mechanism allows it to read what it's written and generate more things, which is again a loop. So, maybe people didn't think, "Hey, we should build some loops, maybe that will make it conscious". But if "strange loop" is what defines consciousness, there are lots of loops in there onto which such a strange loop could conceivably form.

nextaccountic 14d ago
> First, an LLM describing its own experience is not actually proof that it has any experience to be aware of, Likewise, humans describing their own experience is not actually proof that they have any experience to be aware of
- gwd 13d ago
  Indeed, but I actually kind of mis-spoke here. The question is less about having an experience to be aware of, but the ability to accurately reflect internal state. Even humans need to learn how to read their own internal state (e.g., saying "I got mad" rather than "I felt ashamed because I wasn't living up to my picture of what a good person is, and covered up the shame with anger"). But if an LLM were to say, "I'm sad" or "I'm happy", does that actually correlate to anything? I'm OK with saying "The LLM was sad", if there is an internal state that leads to observable changes in behavior correlating with the kinds of changes in behavior humans have when they're sad. The question is, if the LLM says "I'm sad", is that because it has that internal state (self-reflection)? Or is it because that's the kind of thing a human would say in that context? I think both are possible. I also think that between internal probes and behavioral testing, it should be possible to determine which one is closer to the truth. I'm just pointing out that "LLMs talk about their internal state" isn't proof that LLMs have self-referentiality, without additional evidence that the talk is actually related to their internal state.

frankknightwasr 14d ago

I think the missing idea for AI is in Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. The book's thesis, very roughly, is that the hemispheres aren't redundant processors: the left specializes in focused, decontextualized representation (sound familiar?), while the right maintains broader, contextual engagement with the world (McGilchrist fuzzily reduces it to "what is out there?" which is fundamentally about ascertaining uncertainty as a mode of attention). And crucially, the corpus callosum connects the two processors and crucially helps preserve their functional separation through certain channels (as both sides are connected). Transformers look suspiciously like very powerful left hemispheres. They are phenomenal at manipulating representations, but increasingly weird when the representation gets mistaken for the thing itself. Hallucination, sycophancy, context collapse, overconfident completion, etc. all look less mysterious when you compare it to the lists of pathologies that those with right hemisphere injury face (e.g. anosognosia, confabulation). So what seems missing isn't a Gödelian strange loop but the other side of the brain and a mediator between the two sides. The way I think about it is like Kriegsspiel, the ur-game for roleplaying and wargames. To truly "simulate" war (or a fantastic medieval adventure game), the simulation requires three sides: The Blue Team with a goal, the Red Team with its own goal (typically to stymie the Blue Team), and the Umpire, whose only job is to objectively simulate the effects of the orders of the two sides. The Umpire has the true state of the world; Blue and Red only get observations through the Umpire. Neither can directly inspect the other's state. Each side must provide orders to the Umpire, who, ideally, being an SME, is able to process them both according to the rules of Kriegsspiel but also their real world experience in war. And that's the whole point of it in the first place: the Umpire maintains the fog of war between the players, with the ultimate purpose being improving the generalship (i.e. learning) of both the Blue and Red sides. And what is generalship really? It's being able to discern resources and operations in a world of Knightian uncertainty where one must evaluate whether there is an active intelligence attempting to thrwart your model of the world and your goals. (An aside: I think this is why Dungeons & Dragons fails fundamentally as a rules/rulings-bound game. The dungeon master and referee are the same person, while each role has a fundamentally different goal. With split roles, the DM can actually try to kill the players using the Dungeon with the same level of asymmetric information as the players and the GM to actually referee the game neutrally with a view to what actually happens.) Nobody actually gets the God's-eye view. The Umpire gets objective reality but lacks insight into the minds of either side, both of which are pursuing unique ends. This triad allows for genuine Knightian uncertainty in games where judgment (i.e. creating and using precedent) is fundamentally required. This triad is also shared by law, government (and from my perspective trinitarian theology). Intelligence becomes qualitatively more powerful when the architecture prevents any one component from possessing a complete, self-consistent description of the whole, while allowing the components to interact through constrained third parties. I suspect this is also why human cognition seems to somehow avoid Godelian incompleteness by sidestepping the requirement that, as a formal system, it contains a complete model of itself. Just give the system multiple partially informed perspectives coupled through an epistemic boundary, and incompleteness becomes a source of entropy sifting and uncertainty rather than failure modes. And if what I suspect is true, at some point the qualitative bottlenecks that pure transformer-style systems possess should begin to disappear when this approach is applied. But I'm generally an idiot, so take all this with a huge grain of salt.

macleginn 14d ago

‘But the idea that you’d need explicit self-referentiality before you could get convincing and world-changing conversational intelligence?’ — has anyone ever formulated this actual idea or anything logically equivalent? This looks like a mighty straw man.

yu3zhou4 14d ago

I found that in LLMs the self-reference defined as "referring in generated text to itself" (so a bit different than in Scott's blog) comes largely from the chat template https://openreview.net/pdf?id=3O2A23MhNi https://openreview.net/pdf?id=3O2A23MhNi

m-hodges 14d ago

I've used concepts from GEB a lot in my thinking about how LLMs. On self-referentiality and the MU Puzzle: https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-04-21-openai-o4-mini-high-mu-puzzle/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-04-21-openai-o4-mini-high-... On Gödelian limits of prompt-safe AI : https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-models-by/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-model... On the blurry line between pattern matching and reasoning: https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/ I'm glad that the author of this post ends with: > What’s left? Consciousness because when I've read (and re-read) GEB, I find the book to be much deeper than just a threshold for conversational intelligence.

xpl 13d ago

LLMs feed on their own output during inference, so there is a loop on itself, isn't it obvious?