alt Hacker News> Aren't those two statements at odds?
Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.
So what's conscious? People and other animals with sense organs and nervous systems. It's even possible that anything which senses its environment could be conscious: https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-b... . That might include a robot connected to a camera and other sensory apparatus. Now you could argue that a computer running an LLM can pick up what its user types, and might therefore be conscious of which keys are being pressed. But not of the colours, sounds, smells, and other things described by human authors in its training set.
> Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it.
Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? What evidence is there to support this claim? Can you empirically measure consciousness to demonstrate its presence or absence?
Is there a lobotomy you can perform to make someone unconscious but still able to respond to those around them? If such a lobotomy is within the realm of physical possibility then (at least theoretically) why can't LLMs be given equivalent functionality? If such a lobotomy is fundamentally impossible then by what mechanism is consciousness influencing human behavior?
> Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.
So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step but on the other earlier you claimed that it requires the ability to sense the physical environment and that somehow LLMs can't do this (despite that I can feed them data from an environmental sensor). If it's an extra step presumably arbitrary data can be fed into it. You're simultaneously claiming that it's separate, yet somehow fundamentally tied to sensing the physical world (so not actually separate), and also that certain types of physical sensors are specially privileged (no physical mechanism proposed). And you don't seem to have evidence supporting these seemingly contradictory claims.