Ned Block explores this difficulty in his The Harder Problem of Consciousness paper. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621

Ned Block explores this difficulty in his The Harder Problem of Consciousness paper. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621 He uses Commander Data from Star Trek as the example. Since we don't know whether it is something unique about our biology that leads to consciousness or consciousness is functional, then we can't determine whether Data is conscious. It also gets into the weeds about what sort of functional equivalence might or might not count. Data is obviously not the exact same functionally as we are, neither are LLMs. There are important differences. We know neurons don't use backpropagation, for example. So what is the basis for being conscious?