It's hard to keep this theoretical. Yes a machine is just a machine.
Defining a machine to be conscious, allows the individual to soak their mind in code and silicon as a receptacle for their spirit.
It creates a pull into a 'second mind'. Anybody who believes this is likely to invest heavily in the maintenance of new technology.
A 'conscious machine', creates an uneasy feeling that we should work to embed our spirit, knowledge, intellect into flipped bits, like expectant mothers. That we should work for the machine, and to the ends of the machine.
And that machine is somehow defined-to-be or a naturally, consciously alive (to a large or small degree). It is said to have a mind worthy of a person's professional output and it can hold the power of a marginally believable conversation.
While all of these described properties are vaguely plausible, it does nothing to help me understand the meaning of a technology, and only benefits those looking to create a fevor around a new tech product.
Describing chatgpt as a stochastic parrot or chinese room grants me a metaphor or analogy for the inner functions of the tech. It also lets me see, or otherwise guesstimate the products abilities clearly, without the belief-as-marketing hype.
I can take the stochastic parrot metaphor, to an article about LLMs and understand in a couple of days what took years of research to create.
Following the belief of computing as real human intelligence and that human intelligence is fundamentally mathematical, requires on some level submission of your mind to a machine that has it's own goals programmed in by someone else.
This centuries-long process of trying to encode and store all human knowledge behind the secure walls of complex coded signs.. and it's advocates for that process, create a subtle and deep twinge of future melancholy or dread or something. The idea that all written/typed meaning will be accessible only by the spiritual power brokers, and not our sons.
No. On some level, machines are just machines, like an abacus or a weaving loom. It can host concepts in the same way that a weaving loom is 'intelligent'. It holds it's shape, abstractions and functions by the laws of physics/metaphysics and according to my human dictates.
You follow the raven into the computers-are-conscious dream at your own risk. Computers are leaning towards controlling people rather than emancipating them. Leaning very hard in that direction. Do we want that? Freedom of mind and meaning is valueable.