They’re made out of weights

My perspective comes from a set of pillars. First, I work at an HPC center, where we support running and development of AI systems, incl. international projects. IOW, I have knowledge about how these systems built, work and needs to continue working.

Moreover, I'm an HPC programmer myself, so I'm not completely uninformed about the math this involving this thing, and I'm lucky enough to have friends who are much more dedicated than me, and we discuss how this thing works and feels like this way.

I'm not an AI hater per se, being programmed AI systems in the past, incl. emergent intelligence systems with multi-agents which can span continents if need be (this was my master's thesis, time flies).

However, knowing what these things are capable of and how they are built. I don't believe them they're conscious/sentient beings. I also had much more time to ponder on these things even before LLMs being a thing. Some hard sci-fi books have asked these questions seriously in their captive adventures way earlier. If one reads these books seriously, there are a lot of philosophical angles to consider and draw upon.

I can discuss in good faith. For hours, days or months even, but throwing "you're a narrow-minded dogmatic luddite neanderthal!" card to anyone disagreeing with you is not it.

For LLMs to have consciousness we would approach fictional levels of how the universe works, and magical levels of how any interpretation of information as an equivalent of some qualia would magically apply. (E.G. the word hurt in output by an LLM, would be associated with pain)

You can't deduce consciousness or qualia from the output of an LLM.

Sure on a purely philosophical level, since qualia isn't measurable, you can claim that it can exist in anything, even inanimate objects, but this argument is as moot as anything that approaches the limits of philosophy.

But overall, there is no reason to believe LLMs have qualia or consciousness, it would be absolutely absurd.

This would imply that information in itself would magically entail qualia based on it's valance or something like that.

An LLM "saying" I am in pain, won't magically make the pain appear, based on what criteria? Even algorithmically there is no basis to even simulate something like this, it is impossible for it to emerge architecturally.

Humans don't feel pain because on a purely information level this is negative for the organism, obviously the nervous system does something deliberate to signal pain, and it evolved this way.

And also don't forget the dynamic aspects of the brain, and the binding problem, consciousness and qualia can't exist statically, you can't have a gpu (or piece of paper) represent a computation or w/e and qualia to exist.

The binding problem itself entails that the brain is doing something in particular to solve it, I personally speculate that it's the electro magnetic field in the brain, it's the only way to be able to globally represent information.

If it were otherwise, then it would go into magical territory, it would mean the information itself would raise to qualia, and it would also entail that you wouldn't even need physical connections between neurons, just for them to behave this way and represent information. E.G. replace each neuron with a microscopic led or w/e, and each synapse with radio waves or w/e, if qualia didn't have a physical aspect, and was purely informational and computational then this would imply that you can ultimately derive it from something as abstract as numbers on a piece of paper, and when you get to that point, you not only can't solve the binding problem, and it becomes magical, but you also can't solve the valance/direction problem, it would imply that something like pain, or any negative or positive sensation arises purely from the interpretation aspect of the information, but we know this isn't the case, organism evolved to represent in particular such signals, for survival for example

My brain is doing the exact same thing.

I learned enough to compress concepts like a bike and what a bike does and for what i can use a bike.

Ask a LLM and it will answer you similiar to humans.

Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description.

LLMs just have so much data in form of text available and are able to ingest all of this, that the LLM compression algorithm doesn't has to be that good/finetuned than ours.

But I would assume that Yann LeCun's JEPA or other breakthroughs in the next few years will get us there.