Cognitive Gridlock: Is Consciousness a Jamming Phase?
In the world of physics, when particles in a system become so densely packed or cooled that they lock into place, we call this phenomenon jamming. Sand becoming rigid under pressure, traffic freezing on a highway, or even glass transitioning from fluid to solid—all are governed by this principle. What if the same laws applied to intelligence? A provocative new paper, Consciousness as a Jamming Phase by Kaichen Ouyang, suggests just that: large language models (LLMs) exhibit consciousness-like properties not as a software quirk but as a physical phase transition, mirroring the jamming of particles in disordered systems. ...