It is ridiculous. I skimmed through it and I'm not convinced he's trying to make the point you think he is. But if he is, he's missing that we do understand at a fundamental level how today's LLMs work. There isn't a consciousness there. They're not actually complex enough. They don't actually think. It's a text input/output machine. A powerful one with a lot of resources. But it is fundamentally spicy autocomplete, no matter how magical the results seem to a philosophy professor.

The hypothetical AI you and he are talking about would need to be an order of magnitude more complex before we can even begin asking that question. Treating today's AIs like people is delusional; whether self-delusion, or outright grift, YMMV.