I’m also fixated on the term “experience” in the context of this debate. To me, consciousness is something that one “experiences”, and the two concepts are intertwined.
I am far from convinced that the training and inference regimes of LLMs would qualify as “experience” by any sense of the word.
Now, if we hooked up a plethora of audiovisual and tactile sensors with live feedback directly to a neural network rich with transformers, that was always powered on and fully autonomous, we may be getting there. But we’d probably also be on the verge of manmade horrors beyond our comprehension.
Biological rodent neural networks in a Petri dish stimulated by electrical impulses - more or less conscious than LLMs?
Human on life support, unable to respond to any external stimuli, “braindead” - more or less conscious than LLMs?
I point of sorts. Assuming that is true (I don't think it is), the big question that urgently needs to be addressed is what happens when we DO give LLMs tools to interact with the real (or virtual) world. And people are doing that, right now, in both real and virtual worlds. And people ARE giving LLMs the ability to run continuously for long periods of time, sometimes with enormous context buffers. People ARE putting LLMs into robots with front-end ML and LLM systems for visual processing, and back-end ML systems for autonomous control.
And, yes, concerns about whether biological rodent neural networks are or are not conscious come up frequently in the biological neural network papers. I'm not sure I would want to be a researcher trying to get an experiment past an ethics committee if my biological neural network had 25B rat neurons. (I would hope that they could not).