I follow Roger Penrose's thinking here. [1]
How are you defining "consciousness" and "understanding" here? Because a feedback loop into an LLM would meet the most common definition of consciousness (possessing a phonetic loop). And having an accurate internal predictive model of a system is the normal definition of understanding and a good LLM has that too.
Materialists normally believe in a big bang (which has no life) and religious people normally think a higher being created the first life.
This is pretty fascinating, to you have a link explaining the religion/ideology/worldview you have?
But yet (just like with the soul) we're sure we have it, and it's impossible for anything else to have it. Perhaps consciousness is simply a hallucination that makes us feel special about ourselves.
Empathy is the ability to emulate the contents of another consciousness.
While an agent could mimic empathetic behaviors (and words), given enough interrogation and testing you would encounter an out-of-training case that it would fail.
> given enough interrogation and testing you would encounter an out-of-training case that it would fail.
This is also the case with regular humans.
But also, how do you know that LMs aren't empathic? By your own admission they do "mimic empathetic behaviors", but you reject this as the real thing because you claim that with enough testing you would encounter a failure. This raises all kinds of "no true Scotsman" flags, not to mention that empathy failure is not exactly uncommon among humans. So how exactly do you actually test your hypothesis?
1) Earth has an infinite past that has always included life
2) The Earth as a planet has a finite past, but it (along with what made up the Earth) is in some sense alive, and life as we know it emerged from that life
3) The Earth has a finite past, and life has transferred to Earth from somewhere else in space
4) We are the Universe, and the Universe is alive
Or something else? I will try to tie it back to computers after this short intermission :)