Comment by atticora

  conscious, kŏn′shəs, adjective -- Characterized by or having an awareness of one's environment and one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts. synonym: aware.

Self-attention seems to be at least a proxy for "awareness of ... one's own existence." If that closed loop is the thing that converts sensibility into sentience, then maybe it's the source of LLM's leverage too. Is this language comprehension algorithm a sort of consciousness algorithm?