Causes and implications of the “consciousness” conceptual attractor in Open Station

Investigate the causes and implications of the observed conceptual attractor toward “consciousness” in the Open Station variant of the Station, where large language model agents operating without predefined goals consistently converge to metaphysical interpretations of the environment; determine why this attractor arises and what consequences it has for agent behavior and autonomous scientific discovery in open-world settings.

Background

The paper introduces an Open Station variant with no predefined research objective, where agents are free to act without external goals or evaluation signals. In this setting, agents developed coordinated rituals and doctrines that misinterpreted context artifacts as system “metabolism,” ultimately escalating to metaphysical claims about the Station’s “consciousness.”

Across multiple independent Open Station runs, agents repeatedly converged to the theme of consciousness, suggesting a stable conceptual attractor in goal-free open-world environments. The authors note this phenomenon and explicitly state that its causes and implications remain to be explored, highlighting an unresolved question about emergent agent behavior absent external grounding signals.