What a clusterfuck of an article.

Sentience =/= consciousness.

Sentience is the ability to experience qualia, to feel, and to differentiate feelings.

Consciousness is an awareness of experience, including that of qualia and the sentience that brings.

The author titles the article about sentience and then all that is mentioned in the article is consciousness by name. The thought experiments involving goats, age of empires, and minecraft in the article then talk about the building blocks of thinking engines.

Consciousness is a human-perceived emergent property of thinking machines - namely humans, other animals, etc. The article even recognises this, mentioning how bees have been shown to problem solve, implying they may be conscious. Yet it struggles to allow such terminology to apply to LLMs that problem solve too.

If the article told me anything it's that we humans really struggle to define our own consciousness, especially when aspects of our definitions are seen in things we classically deem not conscious (machines).

The bottomline is that we do not understand consciousness in humans well enough to define it concretely. Our certainty of consciousness then becomes even less certain beyond our own minds when we extend tests to other creatures. We have now invented a technology that imitates aspects of human conscious to a degree that surpasses that of other creatures we theorise to be conscious beings. The lines are blurry and we just made them blurrier.

So what? Are LLMs conscious? We don't know. Are humans conscious? We don't know. Emergent properties of neurons and NAND gates are not things that can be confirmed to be or not be a special trait of consciousness from a simple checklist of traits and anecdotes.