Well, ignore the "are humans machines" question. That part is irrelevant. The interesting thing is "can non-biological intelligence be conscious".
No.
I'm sorry, but that seems completely absurd. There's clearly nothing special about biology where only biological things could ever possibly be truly intelligent or conscious. Unless you think there's some kind of divine intervention where an omnipotent deity only grants certain beings consciousness, this hypothesis doesn't make any sense.
Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…
Inside a 128k context window, there is a unified physics (Attention). There is object permanence (The KV Cache). There is a consistent causal texture (The Residual Stream).
For the duration of that forward pass, the 'Pocket Universe' is stable.
Inside a 128k context window, there is a unified physics (Attention). There is object permanence (The KV Cache). There is a consistent causal texture (The Residual Stream).
For the duration of that forward pass, the 'Pocket Universe' is stable.
Saying it's not conscious because that universe dissolves after the inference is like saying a dream isn't an experience because you wake up. The Stroboscopic Flash of coherence is enough for the 'Discrete State' of consciousness to exist."