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Genuine counterpoint:

If a human says "I am in pain", is it just stringing together words or is it feeling pain?

If you take that seriously it's quite a tough question to unwind. See e.g. Dennett's heterophenomenology conversations.

What counterpoint is that?

The human saying "I am in pain" may feel pain, or may not and be just stringing together words.

The AI can only string together words. It has none of the organs to feel pain. It never had. It has always been code.

I am not saying that everything that a LLM say is true (the human without pain receptors can also say "I have pain" without feeling any pain).

Just that we cannot exclude that LLMs can have phenomenological consciousness by a simple argument of substrate. But similarly we cannot say for sure that they are conscious.

These humans without pain receptors can still suffer just as much as the rest of us.