Why should it be unique among proteins? Bags of water and proteins famously behave in extremely statistically predictable ways on a cellular level ... and are conscious. Animals and humans are nothing but a lot of those bags. Ok ... a very large number. I also have a Msc in statitstics, which tells me a combination of a large number of statistically predictable variables is itself a statistically predictable variable.

So why couldn't a large collection of statistical variables be conscious? Mathematically, it's the same thing.

No, I agree, I think lots of animals have consciousness. I don't consider it to be uniquely human. But LLMs do not have it.

Thats fair.

Not on topic, but I dont think thats going to be relevant.

If a human thinks something is conscious, and feels bad if it gets hurt, it will probably get treated as such.

And what do you think is the differentiator between the two? What is it that birds can do that you posit AI won't be able to do?

Again just to be clear, I'm not saying that AI can never or will never be conscious, or think. I'm saying LLMs (which are currently being mislabeled as AI) are not conscious intellects.

They are, at their core, predictive text engines.

And this is is just my opinion, yours may of course differ. Maybe you believe humans are just predictive text engines