Well, theres a lot of experimentation with actual neural nets mimicing biology (or literally using biological neurons), and I think that could start to raise the spectre.

World model research could be a significant component of that.

In principle, OP is right; humans are just machines. All I constest is that transformers LLMs are even in the same ballpark, or possibly a path there... they are not.

This dude is a Dunning-Kruger case study. Simply by the shear overconfidence

I’m sorry that you have trouble grasping so many basic concepts.

Ironic of you to reference Dunning-Kruger.

All animals are conscious as far as I’m aware, though the complexity of their thoughts may vary. They all act of their own volition, computers do not and cannot act of their own volition.

You do not have to fully understand every aspect of consciousness in order to recognize that inanimate objects do not have it. “Will” is a component of consciousness, this is commonly understood. Computers are tools, they have no will. Computers calculate, they do not think, these are different operations.

I am not oversimplifying things, you are under-thinking things that are already simple (likely due to cognitive offloading).

Fearmongering about the idea of a neural network gaining consciousness is basically like doing free advertising for AI companies lmao

You are ascribing a power to them that they do not possess

For the record, I think neural networks have a lot of useful applications; for example, radiological image recognition. The term “AI” basically has no meaning though, and is most commonly used to describe LLMs, a technology that has very few (if any) good real world applications.

Lol no. Actually cells are demonstrably NOT sentient. They have no capacity for choice. No capacity for emotion or experience. They are literally molecular machinery. And we(scientists) understand that machinery to a shocking degree.

If you think cells have any degree of sentience, then you must make a similar argument for advanced clockwork machines. Not robots, pure wind-up clockwork automata.

I've tried. They're adamant against AI here. It's not even worth the discussion. There's an army of belligerent people here who have made up their minds that LLM are "stochastic parrots" and they're convinced they understand exactly how they work. No one can tell them otherwise. Doesn't even matter your credentials. They're the experts here. If you argue, they'll only belittle you.

Save yourself the frustration and heartache; just silently pity them.