the linguist realizes that the alien creatures cannot be, in fact, conscious because of their lack of semantic understanding:
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding. The exact opposite of what Watts seems to claim.
That is an option. I think we are philosophical zombies a decent chunk of the time. Constant self awareness and mindfulness are calorically expensive. No reason consciousness has to be continuous.
Could be. However note that any current LLM passes this ambiguity parsing test with flying colors- both the implicit choice of the most probable meaning and the subsequent reflection on all the possible alternatives- so if that proved anything it would mean that they're conscious too.
I've just skimmed the Wikipedia entry you linked:
So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding. The exact opposite of what Watts seems to claim.