It's not even a question of whether a computer program in general could become consciousness. It's a question of, if a key-value store with connection patterns derived from a large natural language corpus is conscious, then so is every other program run on that circuitry. Then my phone's keyboard's next word predictor is conscious.
In large language models today, words are turned into continuous token embeddings, embeddings are selected and recombined a few times (or many), and training data shapes the embedding space and recombination process to create a system that's good at predicting plausible next tokens in a sequence. The reason people who understand their operation can confidently assert they're not conscious is because they understand that that's all that's happening. There's no "there" there to give rise to anything deeper, unless you're also willing to say your computer's calculator app is also conscious.
Also as someone that's also studied a bunch of neuroscience, this is nothing at all like how the brain works. And yes, once again, the people most prone to philosophize like this on intelligence and consciousness don't understand how any brain science works either
I can say with absolute certainty, that you don't either.
These billion parameter models are way to big for you or me to understand.
You make the same fallacy that Searl does. You assume that unconcious substrate can't give rise to conciousness through their configuration.
Just like we have a good working theory on how the brain operates, the devil seems to be in the detail. It's neither in the big connectome/architecture, nor in the small mechanisms neurotransmitters/activation functions (or the attention mechanism that you somewhat wrongly describe), but somehow in the system's dynamics. Heck for all we know it might actually be the appearance of consciousness that actually gives rise to consciousness.
I can't say with 100% certainty that a calculator isn't having some form of ghost, after all some ants are little more than neurological counters and shift registers, and people would probably place them somewhere on the spectrum for having a ghost that is closer to a human than to a sewing machine.
Turing adressed what little points your argument has 70 years ago in subsection 6. (4) to (8): https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?log...
On a side note. What is it with neuroscientists and arrogance? As if that stuff was some secret knowledge, that's unpublished or too arcane for anybody but them to understand.
It does not matter if your conversation partner is made up of a giant turing machine, a huge set of prolog rules, a giant neural network with a single hidden layer, a really deep transformer, a convolutional kernel, or a bustling pile of ants drawing words into the sand.
When conversing with one another we have the implicit assumption that we are not the only conscious being in existence despite it being a completely subjective phenomena. Everything else would be quite impolite.
Turing extends that (im)politeness to non-human phenomena. So long as there is the appearance of intelligence and consciousness it is the polite thing to assume that there is actually consciousness.
End of the day, you are arguing that since you could explain away the process, it is not conscious.. but you could explain away anything. How is human brain conscious? It is just activation of neurons across a large network. We can even poke electrodes and simulate various feelings.
It would be helpful if you can explain why you believe this to be true rather than what you believe to be true.
Well first of all, an important thing to understand is that there BE dragons. The fact that anything exists at all means there be dragons, both literally and figuratively. Let me explain:
In the world we have various 'symbols', whose main characteristic is that they can be told apart from one another, like the color yellow and the pitch of your voice. Now look to the very edge of existence, at no symbols- it is clearly impossible for there to be nothing, because there are obviously at least one symbol, even more than that in fact. However there is something key we can derive from this, and for an analogy look back to the laws of physics. In our universe, there is some configuration of symbols that somehow constrains the logic of configurations/interactions of symbols within this place. Without some symbols to do some local constraining of other symbols, nothing is constrained. So look to the edge of existence- at 1 symbol, what constrains its nature, what constrains the quantity of symbols, or even the arbitrary configurations of those symbols? Absolutely nothing constrains them, so it is only logical to assume that every arbitrary configuration of symbols exists right 'now', always 'has', and always will (quote marks because time only exists in our local configuration).
So if(*) there is some fundamental aspect of reality, some force that performs the experiencing of these infinite phenomena, perhaps it experiences infinite, arbitrary configurations of everything- anything from receiving sensory data equivalent to the smell of a strawberry whenever the bottom 1/3rd of your toaster touches a carbon atom between 16:13 and 16:14 on a Monday, to an arbitrary I/O mapping to the configuration which we call the human brain in a totally arbitrary 'universe'.
Effectively, what I am arguing is that it may not be off-base to argue that machines can be conscious. The truth may very well be the opposite, that absolutely everything to ever exist is conscious in every way that can be conceived! That is, if there is no fundamental rule that makes my configuration the only possible conscious one, but I doubt that.
You are asserting that it's not conscious, as if it was self evident, just like Searle does for his chinese room.
However I've yet to see any argument on why it can't be conscious. We simply don't know what produces the subjective phenomenon of consciousness. A "zombie" is by definition indistinguishable from a conscious "non-zombie", therefore the only ethical thing to do is to err on the side of caution and assume consciousness where conscious behaviour is shown.
The immitation game is a lot more about philosophy than actual tests.
To quote directly from turings paper:
>>> The Argument from Consciousness
This argument is very well expressed in Professor Jefferson's Lister Oration for 1949, from which I quote. “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.”
This argument appears to be a denial of the validity of our test. According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe ‘A thinks but B does not’ whilst B believes ‘B thinks but A does not’. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks. <<<