I would argue, that the null hypothesis is that it is not, and that anyone claiming that there is a mote of consciousness are the ones with the burden of proof.
The null hypothesis is that we don't know jack shit about consciousness. Any claim of certainty seems extraordinary to me and I want to hear the evidence.
We know quite a lot about consciousness. You may not, but we know enough to know the informational dynamics in a brain are vastly different from an LLMs.
Exactly what kind of certainty are you looking for? Happy to provide it at a molecular, cellular, tissue or whole brain level.
Yes we can say it has conscious experience. The content and depth of it, we cannot yet fully grok, and of course, what it feels like from inside the ant is something we never will know.
Would you want evidence that your your bicycle is not conscious? It can sense your inputs. It responds to the environment. The gears do multiplication (reasoning!).
To make the claim that an object is not conscious you need to both define what consciousness even is, then you need to make a machine capable of measuring it.
If you have done neither or those things then any claim you have about a bicycle's consciousness is just baseless speculation.
Regardless -- if we don't know jack shit about consciousness (your words), then any claims of LLMs being conscious are by definition untestable, pure speculation and based on no evidence at all.
People keep saying this, but it's not true. We know a lot about consciousness. There's a lot we don't know about it, of course, but "jack shit" is wildly incorrect.
> I want to hear the evidence.
If you believe LLMs are conscious, then the onus is on you to provide evidence of such.
the onus is on whoever is making a positive claim.
If you are stating "LLMs are not conscious" you need to provide evidence, just like how if you are stating "LLMs are conscious" you need to provide evidence.
