@pa27 @GossiTheDog no, indeed. We generally assume that an inanimate rock isn't conscious, but having had no experience of being a rock, can we really say that? Is a human suffering from locked-in syndrome not conscious just because there are no external signs of consciousness?

I'm not saying that I think a rock is conscious, just pointing out that we only have our own experience to draw from, so making any kind of claim about a non-human seems pretty suspect

@GossiTheDog (How do we know that another human is concious, other than assuming that their experiences are similar to our own? Can we really say whether something completely non-human that behaves in a concious way isn't really concious, it's just designed to look like it is?)

@GossiTheDog To be honest, I'm always slightly incredulous at the argument that an LLM isn't concious. The argument is "well we sort of know how an LLM works, it just works like <blah> so isn't concious", to which I counter that we don't know how humans work and they might also largely just be doing <blah>.

I'm certainly not saying that AI is concious and has feelings, just that the reasoning given for why it isn't feels rather weak!