Reacting to stimulus is a behavioral response. Consciousness is subjective experience. We know humans have subjective experiences (and suspect many other animals do), but not every stimulus reaction is conscious, and consciousness is not limited to perception (feelings, empathy, dreams, imagination, visualization, earworms, inner dialog, memories).
No, we don't. The humans claim that they do, but they may as well be philosophical zombies who claim to have such experiences without actually experiencing them (just as animals don't actually experience pain even if they behave as if they do).
The modern debate about whether LLMs are conscious are not has lots of people whose position is "no, they're not" but with arguments not that much better than Descartes (and also coming from the position of tradition). That's why I bring him up.
> Especially since there is a mountain of evidence proving he was wrong.
Only if you accept a particular way to interpret it. After all, I can show you an experimental proof that apparently the rays of cold (in addition to the rays of heat) exist; but that experiment can easily be re-explained in terms of infrared radiation only.
The tick is at the top of an async jobs queue. The jobs provide the tick with constant updates. And this is not in real time. If you are injured say a sudden injury. You won't even notice until 2-3 ticks after.
Behavior is an emergent property of this. Not it's base.
What I'm actually talking about is decision making. This applies to higher and lower life forms. Even a bacteria will decide things from moment to moment. Well okay how does this happen? Well something in the background must provide new data to the "tick". Ticks don't rebuild on each turn. They get re-used. But that re-use is updated from sensory inputs, memory, and then is filtered to limit how many tokens each congitive tick is forced to process. Anyway consciousness is an emergent property of this system. We're just state machines ultimately.