Again, by our own choices and somewhat hardware limitations.

There is nothing stopping you from adding any kind of sensors you want during a training to an LLM, except money and GPU power at this point.

This seems no different to me at least then someone back in the 80's telling me computers were useless because they were so slow. Hardware only gets faster and more efficient from here.

By your rules, LLMs & deaf-blind people are not conscious, but self-driving cars are? Also a brain in a vat is not conscious?

The real answer is that we don't know if LLMs are conscious, and we don't really know how we'd that figure out. I guess if an AI wrote a philosophy paper on consciousness that had new insights, that might change some minds. But even that would fail to convince most people.

These are not my rules. I was responding to the person above me. It was he who was saying consciousness is responding to the environment. I too disagree with that definition. A thermometer or a NAND gate responds to its environment but I do not believe either is conscious.