The word "conscious" is extremely problematic and the typical connotation encourages very vague thinking. Your first sentence about thinking is a case in point.

The word "conscious" is extremely problematic and the typical connotation encourages very vague thinking. Your first sentence about thinking is a case in point. It seems quite plausible that the word "thinking" may apply to systems that do not feel a subjective stream of experience. So maybe we should say it is thinking in a way but not conscious. The first step is to try to drill down into different aspects of this hand-wavy "consciousness" thing. Also to suggest that it is a threshold is inaccurate because it supposes that there is only one dimension to this. Does it think? Maybe in a way. Is it self-aware (aware of itself as existing and different from others)? In a way, yes, in other ways, no. Does it have a human/animal-like stream of subjective experience? Probably not, since it does not integrate a continuous steam of sensory information in the way we do. But we really can't _know_ whether it "feels" like anything to be that system or not. Does it have emotions? Quite unlikely, since there is no body or survival to regulate etc. and no self central to the text that it ingested. But we can assume that in some way it can simulate emotions in characters since that is necessary to predict text in stories and dialogue effectively.