1. That is not the claim you originally made.

2. Not provably so.

3. Even if it were so, it is self-evident that the human brain's programming is infinitely more complex than that of an LLM's. I am not, in principle, in opposition to the idea that a sufficiently advanced computer program would be indistinguishable from that of human consciousness. But it is evidence of psychosis to suggest that the trivially simple programs we've created today are even remotely close, when this field of software specifically skips anything that programming a real intelligence would look like and instead engages in superficial, statistic-based mimicry of intelligent output.

Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.

I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens.

Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.

The human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?

How are you sure it doesn’t reason about itself? The grammar of languages encode the concepts of self and others. LLMs operate with those grammar structures and do so in increasingly accurate ways. Why would we say humans that exhibit the same behavior are inherently more likely to be conscious?

Toddlers learn over the course of several years of observing training data and for the first few years misspeak about themselves and others. What’s the difference?

Hard disagree. We reliably operate with the concept of a self that’s distinct from others. The chemical and physical processes change in response to stimulus.

Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.

Ad hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.