LLMs don’t have a will of their own and will (very likely) never have one, they aren’t an entity or anything that can have a sense of self. They are a compressed dataset with a next token prediction engine. From the token prediction + complexity of the dataset + reinforcement learning + whatever other techniques AI folks are using we are able to derive judgement and decision making (of course the LLMs don’t judge or decide anything, they have no free will of any sort, it’s purely derived from the patterns within the dataset).

Though I personally don’t find the topic of consciousness interesting, it’s not something we are able to define and is distracting from all the other aspects of LLMs that should be discussed or evaluated for what they are.