[Barrin92]

> If not when it says so and not when it seems to display emotions (and change behavior based on them), when?

A necessary but not sufficient condition is having the architecture for consciousness, which means having the ability to actually experience and reflect on their own internal state, which these models by design cannot do. It tells you it has consciousness because that's part of its training, if the training data and tuning told it to say it has pain in its legs and feels sad about it, it would do literally that despite not having legs.

The human brain has a limbic system that regulates its emotional state, and there's constant brain activity going on managing those. These models don't sit there and experience emotions they literally do nothing until you ask them to give you another token.