“The question of whether Machines Can Think is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.” — Dijkstra

I was pissed off at the 404 article, because a paper arguing LLMs will never achieve consciousness must define what they mean by consciousness, and the 404 article didn't mention the definition. This is a paper from DeepMind, so surely they are rigorous.

Turned out 404 didn't mention it because the paper never defines what LLM's can't achieve. Quoting from the paper: "A key insight from our contribution is that resolving the present uncertainty surrounding artificial consciousness does not require a complete and final theory of consciousness."

As you say, Dijkstra neatly penned a response to arguments that don't define their terms in 1983. They are exercises in linguistics, not science or engineering.