I point of sorts. Assuming that is true (I don't think it is), the big question that urgently needs to be addressed is what happens when we DO give LLMs tools to interact with the real (or virtual) world. And people are doing that, right now, in both real and virtual worlds. And people ARE giving LLMs the ability to run continuously for long periods of time, sometimes with enormous context buffers. People ARE putting LLMs into robots with front-end ML and LLM systems for visual processing, and back-end ML systems for autonomous control.

And, yes, concerns about whether biological rodent neural networks are or are not conscious come up frequently in the biological neural network papers. I'm not sure I would want to be a researcher trying to get an experiment past an ethics committee if my biological neural network had 25B rat neurons. (I would hope that they could not).