No. Self-attention is more akin to kernel smoothing[0] on memorized training data that spits out a weighted probability graph. As for consciousness, LLMs are not particularly well aware of their own strengths and limitations, at least not unless you finetune them to know what they are and aren't good at. They also don't have sensors, so awareness of any environment is not possible.
If you trained a neural network with an attention mechanism using data obtained from, say, robotics sensors; then it might be able to at least have environmental awareness. The problem is that current LLM training approaches rely on large amounts of training data - easy to obtain for text, nonexistent for sensor input. I suspect awareness of one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts would additionally require some kind of continuous weight update[1], but I have no proof for that yet.
[1] Neural network weights are almost always trained in one big run, occasionally updated with fine-tuning, and almost never modified during usage of the model. All of ChatGPT's ability to learn from prior input comes from in-context learning which does not modify weights. This is also why it tends to forget during long conversations.
If you trained a neural network with an attention mechanism using data obtained from, say, robotics sensors; then it might be able to at least have environmental awareness. The problem is that current LLM training approaches rely on large amounts of training data - easy to obtain for text, nonexistent for sensor input. I suspect awareness of one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts would additionally require some kind of continuous weight update[1], but I have no proof for that yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_smoother
[1] Neural network weights are almost always trained in one big run, occasionally updated with fine-tuning, and almost never modified during usage of the model. All of ChatGPT's ability to learn from prior input comes from in-context learning which does not modify weights. This is also why it tends to forget during long conversations.