The confusion arises because we don't even know if our own consciousness is purely mathematical or not. We are missing an extremely fundamental link in our chai

The confusion arises because we don't even know if our own consciousness is purely mathematical or not. We are missing an extremely fundamental link in our chain of understanding, such that it's an open question of whether or not it's even theoretically possible to artificially mimic a human experience. We can see a big gap between the inner working of LLMs (which, unless I'm mistaken, are still not fully understood mechanically) and the inner workings of our brains. But many people assert that this is a qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. (Probably this is true - we do things like math and spatial perception that seem independent of linguistic abilities. Meaning our brains are more like "LLMs, plus other types of AI mashed together with a central coordination layer") However, nobody on Earth actually knows whether there is a qualitative or only quantitative gap between LLMs and human cognition.