> You absolutely, undoubtedly know that.

First things first. You are wrong. I don't have a gut feeling that LLMs have no phenomenal states. Not anymore. I was skeptical that LLMs can form complex internal representations. Mechanistic interpretability has shown that they can. I'm still skeptical in regard to introspective mechanisms. One token being fed back into the network and KV cache update do seem lacking in comparison to the ubiquitous recurrent connections in the brain.

What I do know is that philosophy hasn't produced an operationalized definition of qualia. So, we need to approach the problem of LLMs' phenomenal states from other angles.

For example, we can argue that LLMs lack something, which seems to be relevant to the problem: a biological substrate, generality (non-CoT LLMs aren't Turing-complete), "something something feedback"[1], and things like that.

"Admit that you know that" is boring.

[1] I'm referring to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-pa...