Comment by fwn
3 hours ago
You seem to have conceded the "is it deterministic" argument only to sidestep by declaring determinism irrelevant. Your original claim was that LLMs are deterministic "in the same sense" as brains.
We can write down an LLMs full register, and that register/book contains the whole output universe of the text generator. That book does not act, it is morally neutral. That the brain has such a register at all is just restating the determinism axiom, which you treat as fact.
A text is not conscious, and we can not wish it into consciousness, no matter how many human-like patterns we find in the book / the generated text. It has not been shown that running the text adds anything over the text written out. Researchers are super motivated to find machine consciousness but cannot find it, while a company months from its IPO keeps pitching shadows of consciousness all day. It really is a PR strategy.
I am a physicist. I worked (briefly) on foundations of quantum mechanics. I discussed compatibilism extensively with philosophers.
I have _never_ come across the position you seem to take here, that determinism has bearing on the question if we are conscious and sentient.
It does have bearing if your definition of consciousness rests on free will and you think that's incompatible with determinism. Now I don't think a lot of people seriously believe that [1] but it's not some logical nonsense.
[1] Off topic: I think most people are really compatibilist but a lot of them (like me) also believe in non determinism. Not believing in free will is really rare.