anyone who thinks a computer can become conscious fundamentally misunderstands what a computer is
you could build a computer out of water pipes or minecraft blocks. you could even run chatgpt on them
but no one in their right mind would call that computer conscious
it’s easy to confuse the simulation with the thing being simulated, especially if your ego is attached to it
of course, i can’t *prove* that water pipes are unconscious. proving such things is impossible. but i have sufficient reason to believe they won’t become conscious no matter how you arrange them
besides, researching whether models are conscious seems weird when we still don’t really know what consciousness is. hard to test for something we haven’t even defined
i’m sure we can learn a lot about ourselves from these systems but we should take claims about their consciousness with a very big grain of salt