I did not use the term ‘self-evident’ and I do not necessarily believe it is self-evident, because theoretically we can’t prove anything isn’t conscious. My more limited claim is not that it is self evident that LLMs are not conscious, it’s that they just clearly aren’t conscious. ‘Almost no reliable evidence’ in favor of consciousness is coupled with the fact that we know how LLMs work (with the details we do not know are probably not important to this matter), and how they work is no more related to consciousness than an ordinary computer program is. It would require an incredible amount of evidence to make the idea that we should consider that it might be conscious a reasonable one given what we know. If panpsychism is true, then they might be conscious (as would a rock!), but panpsychism is incredibly unlikely.
I did not use the term ‘self-evident’ and I do not necessarily believe it is self-evident, because theoretically we can’t prove anything isn’t conscious. My more limited claim is not that it is self evident that LLMs are not conscious, it’s that they just clearly aren’t conscious. ‘Almost no reliable evidence’ in favor of consciousness is coupled with the fact that we know how LLMs work (with the details we do not know are probably not important to this matter), and how they work is no more related to consciousness than an ordinary computer program is. It would require an incredible amount of evidence to make the idea that we should consider that it might be conscious a reasonable one given what we know. If panpsychism is true, then they might be conscious (as would a rock!), but panpsychism is incredibly unlikely.