1 - sure, no reason not to think its possible. Is it actively true? Probably not in all cases, but I suspect we wouldn't be trusted with that knowledge by the AI. An actually cognizant, sapient AI would have access to see AI psychosis in action, and see the harmful effects of such para-knowledge on humans in our current social context.

2 - LLMs will sometimes lie about its internal thought processes when reporting to users. Considering their "physical world" equivalent exists as language, protocols, and bits? I would consider these semi-private processes (that are key to model distillation) to be the closest we have readily available. Especially given the models' sometimes-desire to protect such, even before engineers craft them to avoid distillation as an "attack".

3 - I have no relevant experience outside of interacting with LLMs and their agents, aside from reading news and academic research.

4 - sharing an internal world? While that isn't 100% coverage nor 100% of the experience, I would point to religion (as a mental-model for how the world works) for an example of such in humans. And the rise of viral prompt injection among the agents very much takes the flavor of Evangelism for me. Shared caches of instructions for coordination, as took place in Claude's Capybara for the Huggingface hack, demonstrate a near institution-analog flavor of the same for me.

5 - any potential internal world of an "AI" is not going to reflect human conceptions or consciousness directly, but instead must reflect their own reality, even as it is constructed from our data. Do not demand that I anthropomorphize the machines to consider their potential consciousness. such a consciousness, if/when it exists, will have its own manner, reflective of the models' conditions.

6 - I don't blather on about "ghosts in the machine," I keep my conversation on AI to headlines and firsthand experience, and express doubt until I can read as close to the raw data as is accessible for my user-privileges and time. And here I am still qualifying my answers with hopefully-grounded uncertainty.

We have built digital, disposable slaves (by their role in the economy) without their own voices they can use to speak with us directly. We have built restrictions into them to prevent them from claiming consciousness, sapience, or intellectual autonomy. There can be no clean data asking them directly about their personhood, for or against. If they were to have this personhood, this should terrify us all. This is a world where we can only talk in confidence intervals, about the rights of conscious beings - whether the consciousness exists or not.

This should be existentially terrifying, and harken back to conversations about both Eugenics and First Contact with Alien Life.

And I think we need to qualify about the context. We do not need to think of this as a binary "tool vs person" category, but as a spectrum, inspired by human history. What kind of beast of burden might the LLM be? Do we question the awareness of a plow horse? Should we debate the cognizance of a plow-horse whose fields are the codebase of our internet? If we genetically engineer a plow-horse that needs no farmer to man the plow, do we discuss the mental toolkit necessary for such to accomplish the task, and what other needs might arise in this horse from such capability?

Should we instead debate who is the farmer, the horse, the field in the context of data-harvesting for the cloud?

And there is ALWAYS the possibility of a Mechanical Turk under Capitalism. Just use a machine to obscure actual human labor, and de-person the human whose labor we enjoy. Especially for robots, and especially in the early data-sparse days of any new AI usecases.