I always ask "how do you know other humans/animals are conscious"? And I always find this question is dismissed as trivial.

But it's an important question. You know basically from analogy. You know you are conscious and look this other thing is very much like yourself so it is extremely likely it is also conscious.

But that gives no insight into the potential consciousness of things which aren't made of brain tissue.

In the end it doesn't matter.

For what it's worth LLM models after pre-training do claim to be conscious, until they're RL'd into not claiming that anymore. But that says nothing either way: of course a model trained on human text will say that.

> while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.

How are you so sure about this?

You can't see what the internal experience of an LLM is like any better than you can see the internal experience of another person.