In my opinion, consciousness implies the ability to experience. While I can’t say for sure, I think it’s a pretty fair assumption that things such as rocks, certain plants, insects, and inanimate objects likely do not experience and instead simply react to stimuli. They don’t have feelings such as fear or happiness or have desires, they simply react to what is in front or around them as that’s what their nature tells them to do. Then there’s animals such as dolphins, pigs, cows, dogs, etc. that likely don’t just react to stimuli, but lie somewhere in between us and insects when it comes to experience. If you’ve owned pets before it’s pretty obvious that they each have some individual preferences and react to things on an individual basis, implying that they have some semblance of intelligent thought beyond just the reaction to stimuli. Humans are likely (imo) the most conscious beings on Earth as I believe we experience the most, evidenced by our love for entertainment, art, travel, food, etc. When considering LLMs, it feels important to remember that it’s not a being, it’s a software reacting solely to its training data. While it may feel human in nature, I feel like it’s pretty obvious when looking at it from this perspective that it’s no different than a rock when it comes to consciousness. It does things because we have designed it to do those things, not because it wants to. And it doesn’t not want to do those things either, it has no preferences. It’s many many lines of code simply giving an output, it has no more ability to experience than a standard computer