[sfpotter]

Stochastic parrots have nothing directly to do with consciousness. You might consider reading the paper or at least the definition on Wikipedia more carefully.

As far as your statement regarding consciousness goes, it's glib to say that no one has any reference point for what consciousness, thinking, or feeling are. We all have our own lived experience to draw on for intuition and guidance to inform our thinking, which is invaluable. We can relate our qualitative perception of these phenomena to other things in the world, where a reasonable person can form the hypothesis that "matrix multiplication" is unlikely to be conscious, to think, or to feel by dint of it being an abstract mathematical concept, since there is no precedence for an abstract mathematical concept exhibiting any of these qualities. Indeed, the only things in our lived experience which can plausibly be said to be conscious, to think, or to feel are biological organisms, of which a computer is not.