> a bunch of pipes and valves can be conscious

Billions * billions of pipes and valves can result in emergent behavior that appears conscious while at the same time the sound of a single independent water pipe can moan and sound like human speech or otherwise lifelike and evoke human emotions.

I think LLMs are doing both of these things and often people are more impressed by the independent fixtures (the moan) rather than the emergent behavior. Both the sound and the emergent behavior can be built on purpose or on accident.

I think it helps to look at this through an Information Theory lens. What information is coming into the system (the human or the machine)? What information goes out of the system which is novel? How much of this can be attributed to attempting to parse random noise aka. `Random_Imagination_Engine` vs something else? The number of inventors who come up with a breakthrough idea after mis-hearing someone is surprisingly high.

If we make the distinction between phenomenal consciousness from access consciousness we can see that LLMs clearly can make decisions based on input (A-Consciousness) but they probably don't have raw feelings and sensations (P-Consciousness).

You will need immense evidence to go against the entire arc of history where all bets about supernatural or aphysical elements have failed. Until you do so, the brain is another not fully solved physical science problem.

And yes, turing equivalence is turing equivalence, I don't see why a system of pipes can't make an AI.

We only need to assume the hypothesis that brains don't exceed the Turing computable to say that LLMs have the same computational power as a brain.

We can't prove it, but given the total absence of evidence of anything exceeding the Turing computable, as a hypothesis it is a reasonable one that would require truly extraordinary evidence to rise above "magical thinking".

Now, that is also far from proving they are "conscious".