The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) produce hallucinations—outputs that are fabricated, unverifiable, or contradictory to source material—and argues that these hallucinations have philosophical implications for machine consciousness. It reviews known causes such as source‑target divergence, training‑inference discrepancies, and overfitting, and presents two empirical studies: one showing that higher temperature settings in GPT models yield plausible but incorrect answers, while lower temperatures produce accurate ones; and another demonstrating that an encoder‑only model trained on encyclopedic data answers factually without embellishment, suggesting hallucinations arise from exposure to subjective, socially diverse data rather than cognitive ability. Drawing on Turing, Searle’s Chinese Room, the frame problem, and cybernetic theory, the authors contend that a model’s self‑reports of emotion or sentience fall within the definition of hallucination, implying that any future machine consciousness may remain epistemically inaccessible because it would be indistinguishable from an advanced hallucination.
arXiv:2609.22152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imagination performs as a high-level function of large language models (LLMs) which determines the potential of how an LLM creates unseen or creative c...
arXiv:2603. 09986v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucinations, the tendency for large language models to provide responses with factually incorrect and unsupported claims, is a serious problem within natural language processing for which we do not yet have an effective solution to mitigate against.
arXiv:2606. 07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate--producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs--with a consistency that persists across generations and scales.
The paper defends the 'Whole Hog Thesis', arguing that sophisticated large language models such as ChatGPT are full linguistic and cognitive agents, possessing understanding, beliefs, desires, knowledge, and intentions. It rejects low‑level computational starting points and instead builds its case from high‑level behavioral observations, using Holistic Network Assumptions to link actions to mental states. The authors systematically rebut common objections—such as hallucinations and planning errors—by showing these resemble human fallibility and by challenging the necessity of traditional conditions like embodiment or semantic grounding.
arXiv:2608. 19206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned to suppress hallucinations, prioritizing factual retrieval over combinatorial creativity.
arXiv:2606. 07521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates the phenomenon of hallucinations in domain-adapted Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the fine-tuning of the Llama-2 model with the Lamini dataset.
arXiv:2603.18007v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The study explores whether current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities -- specifically, the ability to inf...
The paper proposes using the temporal volatility of internal attention mechanisms—measured by an unsupervised attention dispersion metric—as a diagnostic signal for hallucinations in large language models. It demonstrates that spikes in attention entropy within intermediate layers correlate with reasoning breakdowns, and shows statistically significant AUC improvements of up to +0.076 over output-based baselines on GSM8K and MATH-500 benchmarks using the Qwen2.5 model family.
arXiv:2609.35860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling based consistency is widely used for hallucination detection, yet aggregate performance can conceal systematic differences in which errors a...
arXiv:2512. 21577v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite numerous attempts at mitigation since the inception of language models, hallucinations remain a persistent problem even in today's frontier LLMs.
Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models: A Survey reviews how scaling LLMs leads to previously unseen capabilities such as advanced reasoning, in-context learning, coding, and problem-solving. The paper critically examines definitions, inconsistencies, and the conditions that foster these abilities, including scaling laws, task complexity, pre‑training loss, quantization, and prompting strategies. It also discusses the extension to Large Reasoning Models and highlights safety concerns like deception, manipulation, and reward hacking, calling for improved evaluation and governance.
arXiv:2601. 11429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucination is a central failure mode of language models (LMs).