- We only have a rough idea how brains think

- We have an explicit and complete idea how LLMs work

- What we do know does not match how LLMs work

- Attempting to run an LLM the way the brain works fails

I don't understand how this isn't going back on your earlier claim that complexity doesn't equal intelligence? Our lack of understanding of how the brain works doesn't provide any evidence of it possessing some supernatural faculty that a computer couldn't (with currently non-existent but feasible tech) replicate. And your fourth claim here is demonstrably false: even ChatGPT is based on a neural net. Obviously this does not mean it is working the way the brain works, but it is absolutely complex enough to exhibit emergent behaviors that we could never make sense of.

In fairness to you, ChatGPT could be written as a set of instructions, but that's only because it's no longer learning in its current state. The same could be said of a snapshot of a human mind.

Atlas really is as simple as a bunch of code.

You're responding to a point that I haven't made here, and drawing a false equivalence between discussions of hardware vs software. The discussion as we began it was to imagine a sophisticated learning model placed inside hardware that allows it to gather information about the world around it, the "access to real-world, embodied referents" mentioned in the article.

Okay, where do you draw the line? 'cuz the line has to be drawn.

You have to draw the line too! Once again, I am not arguing that ChatGPT is alive, nor that it is conscious. I do believe that being alive and being conscious are not mutually exclusive, due to my beliefs about consciousness, which is clearly something we are not going to agree on.

I find that ethical individuals have the ability to query their ethics, and unethical individuals have the ability to query the existence of ethics.

If you think that what I'm doing is the latter and not the former then it might not even matter what I'm typing here. I'm concerned that our ethical system is largely based on the idea of being nice to humans and things that are sufficiently like humans, precisely because it leads to Type 1 and Type 2 errors of being cruel to dogs or falling in love with chatbots respectively. And referring to myths in your "facts don't care about your feelings" argument walks a really bizarre line.

Yeah and taking an astrological view of the solar system allows for the position of Mars to influence my luck. That doesn't make astrology factual, accurate or useful.

This is a ridiculous comparison, as astrology is provably false and any theory of consciousness is necessarily unprovable one way or another. Certainly some or more plausible than others, but you need to subscribe to some idea of what consciousness is to even begin to have this discussion, and you're only espousing negative views on consciousness save for fairy-tale appeals to your feelings that humans have got it and computers don't.

Panpsychism appeals to me because I agree that it's obvious that humans are conscious, and it's obvious that my dog is conscious, and it sure seems like chickens are conscious but it starts to get fuzzy around there. It would be ridiculous to lay down some arbitrary line between chickens and another species, or to decide that some particularly gifted chickens are conscious but not others. It seems equally strange to me to finally decide that viruses are conscious, but deny consciousness to other self replicating processes just because viruses have DNA.

What seems most sensible to me is to then conclude that consciousness is not binary, but something all things have to some extent. This is based on how I "feel," but so is every other concept of what consciousness is. But that's what this whole discussion is about.