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This is just giving you state mutation not state persistence. Online learning has been around for a decade+ and unless you want to grant that Alexnet with some online learning was a conscious mind then you argument is also inconsistent.
From an engineering perspective yes, ontologically no. I can shard weights across a gpu, can people shard being across multiple people? I can stream weights from disk, or swap adapters dynamically. That does not magically grant the LLM system intrinsic state.
It doesn't matter from an engineering perspective where a particular set of matrices are stored/operated on but ontologically it matters whether the system has state that persists across interruption and is causally necessary for its future behavior. Its not an arbitrary boundary.
If you pause a human brain and then restart it, it has an internal state that persists, if you do the same to an LLM it loses all internal state, and needs to be externally reloaded to the last checkpoint.
Why? It's a meaningful distinction on its own terms, but what does it have to do with experience, awareness or consciousness?
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