The simplest proof LLMs are not conscious [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
If you created an enough of these and connected them (material properties permitting), you could implement anything in computing, including LLMs.
Asserting that a trivial mechanical movement (or indeed any non-biological process) is conscious has no evidentiary basis in reality, is absurd, and should be rejected out of hand as arbitrary.
Please refrain from reductio ad absurdum.
The building blocks of 3D graphics, cryptographic encryption, protein folding algorithms, and much more are not trivial, rather they are critical elements of our current understanding of how to make something 'compute' like a brain does.
If you think a human synapse is a trivial part of human thought and consciousness I'd say you are the absurd one. (Not saying you think or would say this, just flipping the scenario to beg the question: what do you think consciousness is exactly?)
And not that I am saying LLMs are conscious, nor currently capable of consciousness. I just don't think it's trivial, absurd, or arbitrary to suggest or discuss it.
Direct experience. No further justification is necessary.
All arguments against consciousness presuppose the existence of consciousness (the so-called stolen concept fallacy). Any attempt to refute it necessarily relies on it.
You can’t even have a coherent concept of “knowledge” without it, let alone knowledge of specific things like 3D graphics, algorithms, and synapses.
I think, therefore I am.
Try it yourself.
If that's insufficient for you, you'll have to deal with this on your own.