Some people behave as if there's something mysterious going on in LLMs, and that somehow, we must bracket our knowledge to create this artificial sense of myste

Some people behave as if there's something mysterious going on in LLMs, and that somehow, we must bracket our knowledge to create this artificial sense of mystery, like some kind of subconscious yearning for transcendence that's been perverted . "Ooo, what if this particular set of chess piece moves makes the board conscious??" That's what the "computational" view amounts to, and the best part of it is that it has all the depth of a high college student's ramblings about the multiverses that might occupy the atoms of his fingers. No real justification, no coherent or intelligible case made, just a big "what if" that also flies in the face of all that we know. And we're supposed to take it seriously, just like that. "[S]uper-abysmal-double-low quality" indeed. One objection I have to the initial framing of the problem concerns this characterization: "Physical: whether or not a system is conscious depends on its substance or structure." To begin with, by what right can we say that "physical" is synonymous with possessing "substance or structure"? For that, you would have to know: 1. what "physical" means and be able to distinguish it from the "non-physical" (this is where people either quickly realize they're relying on vague intuitions about what is physical or engaging in circular reasoning a la "physical is whatever physics tells us"); 2. that there is nothing non-physical that has substance and structure. In an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics (which are much more defensible than materialism or panpsychism or any other Cartesian metaphysics and its derivatives), not only is the distinction between the material and immaterial understood, you can also have immaterial beings with substance and structure called "subsistent forms" or pure intellects (and these aren't God, who is self-subsisting being). According to such a metaphysics, you can have material and immaterial consciousness. Compare this with Descartes and his denial of the consciousness of non-human animals. This Cartesian legacy is very much implicated in the quagmire of problems that these stances in the philosophy of mind can be bogged down in.