The discussions are great though, collectively we get better and better at communicating about our own consciousness, because these system push the limits of our definitions, like viruses push our definitions of life. And boy do we like our definitions!

When's the last time you messaged me unprompted?

These seems like bizzare objections, a system can only act in the way that it can act. A tree is never going to get up and start walking, why would a LLM ever start a conversation unprompted? That just isn't how the system can behave.

You are just as limited by deterministic physical processes in your brain as an LLM is in a cpu.

That being said however, yes, we do not have any good definition of consciousness that is universally accepted, which makes the whole discussion useless or at risk of people talking past each other.

He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.