alt Hacker NewsPeople aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, and if you ask them they'll tell you that.
I'm not conscious of magnetic fields, or ultraviolet light, but other animals are, and no amount of study will overcome that deficit.
Okay, but there are multi-modal models. So do those experience qualia of sound and images? Do the text based ones experience the qualia of reading, or of finally comprehending a difficult concept after struggling with it?
For that matter, what exactly is the difference between "seeing" that a car is red versus an LLM reading an array of pixel data? Your eyes "just" translate photons into analog signals after all.