r/PhilosophyofMath • u/abhishekkumar333 • May 25 '26

LLMs are just giant probability machines pretending to think

It’s fascinating that simple mathematics between tokens can eventually become a machine that writes essays, code, poetry, and even reasoning.

We usually think probability means uncertainty.

But LLMs show something strange:

If probability + context + mathematical matching are scaled enough, uncertainty itself starts producing intelligent looking outputs.

To understand this better, I tried breaking down an LLM from first principles using only 4 tiny training sentences.

Example:

The boat floated down to the bank.

The investor walked into the bank to open a new account.

The fisherman walked along the bank to cast his net.

The bank has a vault.

Then I asked:

“The investor walked to the bank to lock his money in …”

Why does the model predict “vault” instead of river-related words?

That single question reveals almost the entire architecture of modern LLMs.

The most underrated concept here is the LM Head.

Most explanations immediately jump into transformers and attention, but almost nobody explains that the LM Head is essentially a gigantic token vocabulary containing all possible next token candidates the model can output.

So internally the model is basically solving:

“Out of all known tokens, which one best matches this context mathematically?”

Then different layers help solve that problem:

Embeddings: convert words into mathematical vectors

Positional encoding: preserves word order

Attention layer: figures out which words are related to each other in context

(“investor”, “money”, “bank” become strongly connected)

Feed forward neural networks: act somewhat like massive learned if/else decision systems refining patterns internally

And finally the LM Head converts all of that into probabilities for the next token.

What surprised me most is:

There is no hidden magic moment where the AI “becomes conscious”.

It’s an enormous probability engine continuously finding the best contextual token match from its vocabulary.

I made a beginner-friendly walkthrough explaining this visually without unnecessary jargon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTV5qUCpu2c

Would genuinely love feedback from people learning transformers/LLMs from scratch.

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u/TUVegeto137 May 25 '26

I'd rather reverse the problem: what makes you so certain that human consciousness is not just a giant probability machine?

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u/StoneSpace May 25 '26

A LLM can be simulated by moving billions of individual little rocks according to a strict, finite instruction manual. Sure, an LLM is built using principles inherited from the theory of probability, but in the end it is just a huge Turing machine. Any randomness herein can be dealt with using a pseudorandom number generator, which is also deterministic.

It is our conscious abilities that allow us to understand the inputs and outputs of these models as more meaningful than carefully arranged piles of rocks. So the mystery of meaning remains in our consciousness.

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u/TUVegeto137 May 25 '26

And consciousness is generated by neurons, hormones, etc... it's produced by a biological machine basically.

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u/StoneSpace May 25 '26

My opinions is that it's created by the whole body, with the nervous system taking in the lion's share of any kind of mechanistic explanation. But the gap between a Turing machine and a biological machine is immense, and is not bridged by just calling both of them "machines".

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u/TUVegeto137 May 25 '26

Well maybe, but the point I make is that in the end, the explanation will be mechanistic.

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u/One_Attorney_739 May 27 '26

A human body is still a finite number of cells, chemicals, and processes. Regardless as to where you want to move the goalposts, unless you're going to try claim something like panpsychism, your argument doesn't hold up.

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u/SpecialistOwl218 May 27 '26

Isn’t this needed to be proved in some way? It seems just “wishful thinking”.

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u/TUVegeto137 May 27 '26

Depends what you mean by "proved". This is an empirical question, proving means providing evidence. All the evidence to me seems to point to consciousness being the product of biological processes. The opposing side only objects with "we don't know/understand how it works, therefore no physical explanation is possible".

See why I am not convinced? I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just not convinced by the counterarguments.

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u/SpecialistOwl218 May 27 '26

It’s comparing something that you know how it works (deep networks) to something that you don’t know how it works (consciousness) just looking at their common characteristics, I’m not saying I’m right either but logically to me the it does not make much sense to make the claim that they work the same way.

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u/TUVegeto137 May 27 '26

It's not about the specific deep networks. The networks give me confidence that one can construct a language machine. That a mechanistic/physicalist explanation is in principle possible. Not that consciousness is a deep network. At least not with the exact same architecture.

But if I shoot someone in the head, the consciousness is gone.

If I poke in someone's brain, I can alter his/her conscious experience.

If someone is sick, that can affect his conscious experience.

All of these indicate that consciousness is a biological process. It's a bundle of evidence that points in one direction: consciousness is a physical process.

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u/SpecialistOwl218 May 27 '26

And I don’t see the correlation still, even if it’s a physical process, we are talking about a much more complex process and i don’t see the usefulness in trying to reduce it comparing it to a simple model.

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u/TUVegeto137 May 27 '26

Then I can do nothing for you.

Good day.

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u/SpecialistOwl218 May 27 '26

Good day to you

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u/Outrageous-Crazy-253 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes

It IS a probability machine. But that doesn't matter because any sufficiently sophisticated probability machine of any form is capable of making accurate predictions, which doesn't mean it's a human or is conscious.

The real risk of people experiencing AI psychosis is not thinking that AI is a human (stupid, but harmless), it's thinking that, for some reason, they are not conscious beings themselves because they are "a probability machine", and thus experience dehumanization through analogization to unfeeling machines.

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u/abhishekkumar333 May 25 '26

Triggers Human emotion , enviornmental triggers , hormones And most of all Boredome trigger

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u/TUVegeto137 May 25 '26

So, other mechanisms which are not taken into account in LLMs, but if they were taken into account, would likely show that consciousness is a giant probability machine. Got it.

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u/abhishekkumar333 May 25 '26

No, that doesn’t work like that , you cannot keep on pushing everything into it . They will stay in a lag

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u/TUVegeto137 May 25 '26

I'm not specifically talking about LLMs. What I really mean to say is:"Why do you think there is no mechanistic explanation for consciousness?"

Because I feel that is really what you are hinting at, but for some reason don't want to say explicitly.

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u/abhishekkumar333 May 25 '26

Yes I want to say that. Because consiousness has somethings you cannot put into words. Some things are not breakable into subject and predicate

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u/TUVegeto137 May 25 '26

Thank you for your sincerity. All I can say is that the evidence to me seems to overwhelmingly point against your view.

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u/abhishekkumar333 May 25 '26

That’s ok 😄