Really is it conscious is a bizarre question. Can LLMs simulate the output of a 'conscious' system quite well? Increasingly yes. Is the nature of machine 'consciousness' different from human consciousness of course yes. Can an ai introspect. yes. Interestingly having been working a lot with highly automated (e.g. ratio of prompt to output maybe 1/1000 or less) iterative coding agents recently has iluminated for me just how different machine consciousness is from human. part of this could the harness of course. Time is a mysterious concept to machines. the connection of before and after to cause and effect is far weaker than in humans. over generalization is the norm: this is common in humans as well (c.f. fallacy of excluded middle or false dilemma) but the tricky part with current ai is they present as advanced in terms of acessible knowledge base but are actually shockingly weak in reasoning once you get off the beaten path.
> weak reasoning once you get off the beaten path
Yep. And LLM engeneers improving this issues see perfect correlation with only one thing - data quality and quantity through training pipeline. LLM internals are secondary on many metrics for improving that
Humanity just reached the point where collective accessible knowledge covers semi-full perturbations of all main concepts that human consiousness ever produced, with additional associative expanding (math handles this). Full perturbations with current communication complexity are written down and recorded one way or another, LLMs just capitalizing on that tipping point, imho