Comment by moffkalast

> phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible

That's interesting, but I think that only applies if the consciousness is actually consistent in some wide set of situations? Like you can dump a few decent answers into a database and it answers correctly if asked the exact right questions, a la Eliza or Chinese room, does that mean SQL's SELECT is conscious?

With LLMs it's not entirely clear if we've expanded that database to near infinity with lossy compression or if they are a simplistic barely functional actual consciousness. Sometimes it feels like it's both at the same time.