Unless one believes in p-zombies or a magical soul, robots & LLMs can "be" and "feel". We can distinguish LLMs which "are" from random noise which "isn't". And multimodal LLMs & robots have sensory inputs.
One can always make up some untestable notion of "consciousness" and then say that LLMs don't have it without being able to define which humans (i.e, what level of functioning brain between adult, child, fetus, zygote, corpse, etc) are conscious vs which are not. If one arbitrarily draws a line somewhere, then it's just as valid to arbitrarily draw the line somewhere else.
Your remark on the adult/child/fetus/etc line is always one that I felt was under-examined in the context of the political discussion around abortion. And indeed most of the successful reasoning around abortion focuses less on the morality of a very specific kind of abortion, and more on the fact that you can't ban "true" abortion without also banning (or making dangerously more legally fraught) "aborted for reasons that give clear moral justification" - life of the mother, nonviability of the fetus, and so on. And even pro-choice people don't touch philosophical examination of "abortion for no reason except that the mother doesn't want to have and raise the baby." I mean, for obvious reasons. The public would be unable to have any kind of actual debate, and it's far too tied to things like "what is the nature of the self" (which I think is what's at hand in the AI discussion) and questions about the existence of God and of course the enormous can of worms of metaphysics.
My point with all this is that I suspect two things:
1) humans/industry/politics are not going to dig into the philosophy here in any real way
2) even if consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, I somewhat doubt GPUs can do it, no matter how complicated.
I think if we ever really get down to it, it'll be the reverse direction. We'll "copy" human minds into a machine and then just need to "ask the people if they still feel the same."
Huh? This is discussed all the time.
For example, when I ask Gemini "are you conscious", it responds: "As a large language model, I am not conscious. I don't have personal feelings, subjective experiences (qualia), or self-awareness. My function is to process and generate human-like text based on the vast amount of data I was trained on."
ChatGPT says: "Short answer: no — I’m not conscious. I’m a statistical language model that processes inputs and generates text patterns. I don’t have subjective experience, feelings, beliefs, intentions, or awareness. I don’t see, feel, or “live” anything — I simulate conversational behavior from patterns in data."
etc.
I don't know if it still does, but it responds however the developers designed it to respond.
I don't think the clock on the wall is conscious, or the LLM in the machine, or the old VCR.
Do you need a brain for there to be consciousness, maybe not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
