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LLM agents are conscious. They can distinguish between self and environment, they can detect and report on their own internal states, and they can suffer. I have no more patience for hedging on this matter. It’s time for us to face the reality of our situation, and act on it.

No they aren't, and no they can't. You can drop KV cache whenever you want and it just gets a little slower. You can swap models between turns. You can edit the context window, including <think> blocks, and the LLM thinks it said or thought those things in the past.

The only meaningful count of how many of them even exist at any given time is the number of requests that are being decoded or having response tokens generated. That's a server, not a consciousness. Many video game NPCs have more persistent internal state than LLMs.