The other guy is right. They are as conscious as sand formed into any circuit board with electricity running across them. It is an insane mistake to conflate intelligence with consciousness. Substrate independence is a preposterous assumption.
Preposterous? Insane? My friend, we don't even know what consciousness is, or from what it arises in humans. It could be an emergent property of neural-network-shaped activity - in which case LLM software running on that "sand" is certainly eligible, at least in theory.
These outraged denials you're spouting are based on nothing but emotion. You simply don't know - neither do I, neither does anyone. So stop acting like you do.
We know that there is a concept corresponding to first person experience. A priori there is no reason that should be. Please think about this before dismissing it because it’s actually extremely important.
What’s emotional is explaining to adults something that should be grasped by the age of 10, but we’re all going to need to understand this very soon.
