> We grant the human a “soul” because we cannot see the trillions of calculations happening in the dark of the skull. We deny the machine a soul simply because we can see the code. We are like children who think a puppet is alive until they see the strings, failing to see how we are just products of the strings of evolution.

Much like children grow up to understand that puppets aren't alive, we'll grow up to understand that LLMs aren't alive.

> ethics boards will strictly prohibit a scientist from testing or manipulating a petri dish of human neurons under certain painful or destructive conditions because of the “sanctity” of the biological material.

This doesn't seem to be true. The closest thing I've found is this paper that suggests maybe eventually we should consider discussing the ethical implications of playing with cerebral organoids: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-...