> reeks of insecurity to me
If you're going to try and debate something constructively this is not a good place to start from. I suggest avoiding making claims about the mental state and motivations of people you disagree with and instead explaining your position and asking why theirs differs. You may not agree with what they have to say but you might gain some better insights into why they think the way they do. It'll certainly be more fun than flinging insults back and forth anyway.
For my part, I'm quite certain that LLMs are not conscious despite being unable to define consciousness or specify any conclusive test for it. The reason these are not in conflict is down to the nature of consciousness and how it relates to knowledge and language.
Firstly, I know I am conscious with a higher degree of certainty than I know anything else because conscious experience is how I know anything else, up to and including that I exist (cogito ergo sum). For all I know every experience I have might be a trick. I might be a brain floating in a tank wired up to the Matrix, but even if so I am conscious.
Secondly, one of the things that I consciously experience is the relationship between consciousness itself and language in my mind. What I see is that language is smaller than, secondary to and somehow contained by consciousness. I consciously experience language but I also consciously experience much more than that, things that cannot be conveyed with language. Most of my experiences are like that, things that I could perhaps evoke in your mind by likening them to other, shared experiences, but that I could never concretely capture in language and unambiguously communicate. I know this because I experience those things and I experience language and I can perceive, directly, the categorical distinction between them.
To ask me to "define" or "prove" consciousness, then, is to ask me to capture in language the most extreme example of this categorical distinction. It's asking me to encapsulate in language not just one of the vast array of everyday experiences I have that cannot be so captured, but the entire thing, experience itself. It's just not possible.
But the fact I can't do this doesn't then imply that I don't know anything about consciousness and have no basis on which to hold a view such as "LLMs are not conscious". Indeed the reason I know I can't define consciousness is that I can perceive it and see that I can't. That same perception of and familiarity with consciousness is what enables me to form opinions about whether other people, creatures and things are likely to be conscious. I base these opinions on what I perceive of my own consciousness and what I know of how those other entities behave, came to be and work.
You can of course perfectly reasonably disagree with my opinions on those things, and you certainly have different conscious experiences than I do, but I hope the above makes it clear that the fact that I can't define or prove consciousness doesn't imply that I have no basis on which to form opinions about it.
Given the above it may surprise you to hear that I think true, conscious artificial intelligence is probably possible and that while I don't think it can be implemented by a classical algorithm I doubt it requires new physics or quantum mechanics. My speculation is that the continuum is both physically real and is (as it is represented in our existing physical theories) sufficient to allow it. Consciousness is larger than language but so is human understanding and if we keep going I expect it will eventually get us there. Nonlinear dynamics is where I'd look.
As for insecurity, I'm pretty sure spiders are conscious and that hasn't given me an inferiority complex, so I don't see why data centres being conscious would. I just don't think they are.
