Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality, i.e., aboutness. It has semantic content, and that semantic content is about something other than itself

Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality, i.e., aboutness. It has semantic content, and that semantic content is about something other than itself. LLMs have zero intentionality and zero semantics, because LLMs do not somehow magically transcend the nature of what a computer is, which is in essence a mechanical simulator of syntax. LLMs aren’t reasoning, because the production of tokens is purely the computation of the next likely token. Any patterns that lend themselves to sensible interpretation by a human observer are the result of training on human-generated data and the statistically distributions found within that data. Consciousness as such is the product of immanent causation, not transeunt causation. The trouble with popular interpretations of scientific results is that they come from a place of a crude ambient materialism, and materialism is simply incapable of dealing with the question of consciousness. (N.b. materialism is effectively the “matter” half of Cartesian dualism, itself a highly problematic metaphysical stance. Materialism makes things even worse, because you can no longer even account for so-called “qualia”, which are badly construed in Cartesian dualism in the first place, but completely unaccountable in materialism at all.)