How have you ruled out other explanations for instinctual behavior? For example, there is a body of scientific work which offers evidence that instincts are passed down through genetics, a mechanism which doesn't require that the brain be deterministic. What are the scientists studying this area getting wrong?

What about twins that are separated at birth but grow up to be different? It seems that the existence of even one such pair of twins would invalidate your claims, given how fundamental this would be to the operation of the brain.

They have completely recovered the wiring of fruit fry brains and trained models on that architecture

I know, and it’s an example frequently cited in these types of conversations by people who don’t understand that research.

is a fruit fly conscious?

Quite likely yes.

Is a little device with all th same movement and sense capability using the fruit fly con nectome conscious

It might be, I’m not sure. But because (quite similarly to humans) no one has a way to recreate the inputs from the outside world to pass to such a device, we don’t know.

Though to be fair, my original claim of “it’s not possible” to recreate inputs is probably too strong — it could be possible some day, but my best understanding is that we’d need something like a time machine that allows travel to the past, at least for repeatable tests. And as far as I’m aware, most physicists today are of the opinion that time travel to the past is not possible.

No, not ever.

You can hook computer randomness up to truly random* quantum processes with fairly simple specialized chips.

I know.

Building your argument on such an easily avoided technical detail isn’t wise, because the question can very easily just be asked for a computer that does have access to a source of true randomness.

I'm not building my argument solely on this, but maybe I'm being unclear, so I apologize.

Let's do exactly what you propose; now we pass a seed to the LLM generated from a true hardware-based random number generator. That doesn't change anything about the LLM itself: it's still deterministic. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that a deterministic algorithm can be conscious, and I think there are other factors as well (the fact that it doesn't exist continuously, it exists for brief periods simultaneously in thousands/millions of instances at once, the fact that it is static and unchanging unless re-trained, etc) which all paint a pretty clear picture that it cannot have consciousness.