When I was younger, I thought the Chinese room argument was ridiculously wrong. Any system that could do what it could do would have to be conscious.

Now with the rise of LLMs, I have to say that I was completely wrong. LLMs give us a simulation of consciousness, but they aren't conscious. My mistake was thinking that language was the hallmark of consciousness, which I no longer believe. It seems obvious to me that other mammals are conscious, even without language. Language is orthogonal to consciousness.

I still believe that there is nothing magical about biology that means that a computer program could never be conscious, though.