Clearly consciousness is an emergent property of certain kinds of network, independent of the substrate within which the network exists.
I happen to agree that this is likely, but it absolutely is not "clear" that this is the case.
I still wouldn’t argue that this brain in a Petri dish is, in any way, conscious. Despite it sharing the exact same substrate as everyone around me.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-bra...
Leech neurons used to implement a calculator.
Are you suggesting that applications above some level of complexity can't be implemented using biological components? Because I'm pretty sure all I need to show you is a NAND gate in order to prove that arbitrary computation is possible.
Like for example the China Brain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain. We could in theory organise that and it should in theory be a functional representation of the brain and should in theory prove a functionalist metaphysic of consciousness, just this overlooks the fact that trying to organise that kind of experiment in our reality with a real 1.4 billion people is impractical to the point of impossibility, so in reality it proves nothing.
Or take the hoverboard from back to the future - this seems like a fairly plausible device and is easy to think about, and I could be writing speculative papers about our hoverboard future and what it means for transportation, but when it boils down to it implementing the thing in the way we all believe it should work, like a kind of gravitationally repulsive force field, doesn’t seem like it’s part of physics. I’d want to wait until the day until science delivered an actual good-enough hoverboard that works the same as the one in Back to the Future.
According your definition of empiricism, you wouldn't accept that next years processors will any more powerful than this years until they've been built and you've run a benchmark, which would be a little dumb.
Instead, I'm assuming you combine your knowledge of scaling laws, the basic physics of computation, and your direct observation of the power of modern processors, and infer correctly that next years yet-to-exist machines will be more powerful than those available today.
Re the China brain: its a thought experiment designed to illustrate substrate independence, it is indeed unfortunate that we can't run the experiment. You could absolutely get a small group of individuals together and teach them to reproduce the behaviour of an individual neuron. That would then be enough to demonstrate that a whole brain is possible.
Re the hoverboard: anyone with a basic knowledge of physics knows that this is not possible. Since you have the capacity to reason and access to evidence, you don't have to wait, you can say confidently that it cannot happen unless our physical theories are profoundly wrong.
A basic knowledge of today’s physics would say the hoverboard is not possible. An advanced knowledge of physics five-hundred years hence might show a way of doing it. It “wasn’t possible” to build a thinking, talking machine five hundred years ago and look at us now.
We could make a very dumb biological calculator out of a few genetically-engineered neurons that would very obviously not be conscious.
It's still an open question if we can embed consciousness in our current microchips if we had enough of them together (which I think we currently don't), or if it requires some other physical process we don't fully understand, e.g. quantum. I strongly doubt it does require any quantum shenanigans, but even if it did, we can and will find all sorts of ways to make computers that can perform those shenanigans too. Eventually we're just going to stop being able to move the goalposts, unless you set those goalposts in magic-land.
And say what you want about meat but we don’t seem to find consciousness in rocks or plants or clouds or hairdryers. And the buddists report that some very strange things happen if you meditate for years on end but obviously they must be talking shit and making it up because it’s not testably scientific.
I don't think many people would say an LLM written in Python is conscious BUT an LLM written in Excel is not.
People just don't ascribe consciousness to things that can't converse (or at least emote or give the appearance of emoting), and spreadsheets don't do that.
The reason people are debating the consciousness of LLMs is - obviously - that the LLMs generate sufficiently plausible text that people using them think they're having a two-part conversation. Like I think I might be having a two-part conversation now. Turning your question around, why do you think Hacker News posters are conscious? You have no direct evidence they are.
To be clear: I'm not talking about surface level things like prose. I'm saying that no matter what you do - whether you just paste a truncated log of a command into it with no further comment, or talk like a drunk teenager with no appreciation for grammar, or mix natural languages, or mix natural languages and JSON, or whatever else, the reaction you get is always that you would expect of a helpful person that got your message. It'll try - and usually succeed - to parse out what you actually meant, and deal well with subtleties around it.
This alone may not be enough to call it conscious or intelligent, but at the very least it's a large leap in that direction, and a qualitatively new functionality that classical software does not posses.
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[0] - This is by design, not accident. "Respond to arbitrary input in a way that makes sense to humans" is literally the overall goal function the LLMs are trained to.
When doctors are testing if humans are conscious they'll do things like hold out their hand and say how many fingers am I holding up. Some LLMs can pass that.
Difference in size and complexity and nature of calculations being run?
I'd ask the other way - why do you (general you, people who do not have this inkling) have no problem debating consciousness of meat based brains, but it somehow becomes a category error when talking about silicon? Assuming you don't believe in divine magic, and that divine magic is core to consciousness, there's no reason to assume it's impossible a complex enough machine running complex enough software could be intelligent, or conscious - thinking is computation, and computation is made of math - it's independent of substrate that does the computing in the real world.
LLMs are definitely a different beast than regular software - both in their structure and in their generality. They may not be conscious or intelligent, maybe this specific design could never truly be (though I think it could) - but bucketing them with spreadsheets and terminal emulators is a real category error. If you stop fixating on the underlying substrate, then LLMs are already much more similar to biological minds than to any "regular" computer programs.
But that's still somewhat abstract. In immediate practical terms, it's also why I keep saying that anthropomorphising them gives a better high-order intuition: they are, by design, emulating human thinking in full generality, which makes their overall behavior, including their well-known problems like hallucinations or prompt injections (i.e. manipulation/gullibility), match what you'd expect of a people-like component of a system. It's a real, dangerous mistake, to treat LLMs like regular software components when designing systems.
Your definitions depend on us being computers who think.
Solving some of the intelligence part of our logical thinking doesn’t get us anywhere near consciousness, which is a superset way beyond the linguistic intelligence used for communication.
I personally believe all information processing machines possess some level of consciousness.