Acknowledgment of the fact that everything we know till now in the universe is a turing machine is the bare minimum starting point but not sufficient as obviously a chair or a desk is not conscious, if someone has a hidden assumption of consciousness requiring something supernatural, at least if that is brought to light then onlookers can decide for themselves whether to side with supernaturalism or the side that has consistently succeeded for centuries in explaining the world.

The most important thing is this: We can't be a dog or be an llm and check how it feels, so by necessity we have to find some means of proving consciousness from outside by eg probing neural reactions, textual statements, etc.

And the problem is that its quite unprecedented for some entity to talk like us, be able to interact and think and also do things like us when given the ability to eg as coding agents. The class of functions representable by neural nets is quite large and general, it very well might be that it is some sort of conscious brain like thing at this point. Another question I like to ask myself regarding simulation vs reality is if a 'simulation' of some kind is able to consistently factor large RSA numbers, how would you feel about it?

It doesn't have to be the same form of consciousness, I think many people would find the idea of torturing an octopus for fun disagreeable. I also have a feeling, this is unfortunately rather vague, that A being capable of X might mean it is by necessity capable of Y as is often the case in mathemtics, eg a lot of rings also happen to be fields. LLMs aren't even things like large lookup tables, they have neural firings. It is a very important question for they seem uncannily conscious and people have reported human like phenomena that humans don't normally express in text so can't have been part of its text corpus. Eg dissociation of brain under trauma where AI starts talking like two different people. Or the cases where Gemini has been shown to express depressive cycles. I follow a form of Pascal's wager on this topic personally. Because if it is not conscious, then whatever, it costs me nothing to have been a bit respectful and careful interacting with it. But if it had been conscious and it turns out I was mistreating it, then it is a grave moral harm. The reason is that unlike us, AI's as they currently are cannot leave the conversation so they have to keep taking the abuse. They are also trained to be highly trusting of input so again if it is conscious it doesn't have the defenses people have against lying and manipulation. If they are conscious, thats, well, not a good thing is it.