The philosophical arguments about what it means to be concious are so cagey. Are we more than our thoughts? Is being concious more than being a state machine being fed inputs and generating outputs? Are we more than a feedback machine? What types of animal nervous systems qualify?

"It can't be concious because we understand that it is just reacting in a simplistic way from simplistic inputs." So do other simple creatures. Some just react to light.

I can appreciate his comment that he sees it as more possible when they have inputs of their own (like emotions!). Perhaps his concern is that the entirety of the LLM model is frozen. It has no ability to have a subjective experience of its own. (he does literally say this in the article) It can be copied from one place to another, and (ignoring the nuance of operational details) -- it is largely the same "thing", and has no ability to change, which is definitely in the definition of alive, to say nothing of concious.

I think folks get hung up on "prediction". The prediction aspect is what is enabling emulation. How it does it is irrelvant. If something emulates human perfectly (or better, more human than human!) -- then it is probably concious. (but I agree that the inability to change and have a subjective experience are a pretty good argument against

Probably, Dijkstra would be right to say, "LLMs are no more concious than a submarine can swim." But I think he'd still be wrongfully dismissive of the larger question.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...