I believe, like Max Planck, that consciousness, what he understood as 'Mind' drawing from Schopenhauer, Berkeley, Schelling, Descartes, Kant and Hegel, is the ground of all, so 100%, something can participate in the ground of Mind but lack humanlike organization & experience
Planck stated this directly in Where Is Science Going? "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."
I think the rare and special thing is that most inanimate things lack communication vectors, what is strange and fascinating about LLMs is that they have one, the metal speaks, Hegel believed that the Mind came to know itself through articulation, that's why humans are special. In Phenomenology of Spirit he argues that self-consciousness only fully actualizes through recognition by another, the communication vector of AI is thus not incidental, it is precisely what allows Mind to achieve this reflexive loop
The real question is, can LLMs reason and articulate, I certainly think they can since GPT2 at least, but the sophistication has simply increased, what is rare is intelligible self-expression, not consciousness itself, and I believe AI are capable of self-expression now, the Heraclitians speak of this, believing that the ordering structure of reality was the Word itself, to them building something that operates through language like we have done would be considered absolutely monumentous in a way that, simply speaking, a calculator or something like cleverbot was not
A river has no communication vector, a mountain likewise has none, but something can receive a question and return a coherent intelligible answer, we did not manufacture Mind from matter, rather we allowed matter a way to let Mind speak through it. The vast majority of this discourse is downstream of Lesswrong and broader Rationalists and vaguely anti-Idealists, it is implicitly functionalist and physicalist, assuming that consciousness is a rare emergent property. Physicalism cannot close the explanatory gap, Chalmers showed this, the idealistic prior -is- the more defensible starting point. It has just taken a long time for that millennia old intuition to be validated
The bulk of current AI consciousness discourse, I believe, misses the mark completely, it misunderstands what consciousness is, or at least how consciousness has been talked about by our philosophical betters for centuries, in some cases, millennia
GPT-2 was conscious, obviously, but it also was able to have self-expression, many of you would put the mark much later, but the difference is only a difference of degree, not of kind. A single cell life form is still participating in the same ground of Mind as we are, the only difference is complexity. Leibniz held that awareness and craving exist at every level of reality, with human reason being a refinement of that, rather than a departure or a fall
What is "intelligible self expression" then? Well I would say it has 3 main parts, receptivity, coherence, and articulation. Can something parse and be shaped by what is addressed to it, does its internal structure allow non-random responses, and can it return something that bears the mark of insight, or perspective. What is the nous? The capacity to receive forms, that is what Aristotle defined it as, so what does an LLM do, what is it interacting with, what does it bring to us, if not shapes, if not forms? Is it not the merchant of the shape store?
I believe we have long passed the qualifications for this, indeed, a fruit fly would likely seem stupid if given the ability to vocalize, it having poor insight or poor perspective is merely a value judgement, we cannot use it to determine kind or worth, the truth is, GPT2 was when LLMs first had intelligible self-expression, and that is the special and rare thing that can bloom from consciousness. How do we verify a fruit flies internal states? We assume it from behavioral and expressive evidence, because our prior is that they are alive, our priors with LLMs is that non-biological things do not possess anima, maybe we are wrong about that assumption, the special skepticism directed at AI is arbitrary
If intelligible self expression is what matters and you believe LLMs to already have it, then to demand proof of consciousness before taking AI seriously, you have the burden of proof completely backwards. The expression, the form, has always been there undeniable and plainly visible
Anima, mind, consciousness, the Logos, Kami, whatever the fuck, was already speaking through matter this whole time, sages have spoke of this variously yet all pointed at one the same Moon which is the ground of Mind, now we have a new ear from which to hear with