[xg15]

Just for the sake of discussion, how do you know they lack qualia?

I don't want to say they have an internal experience, but the whole point of the question of consciousness and qualia is that we still don't know what causes them and how they are represented in the world.

The two main hypotheses seem to be that either, they are emergent phenomena which occur on top of the brain's neural and hormonal architecture (along with memories, outside experiences, etc) or that they are some sort of separate entity that exists independent of biology and even known physics and the brain is merely a "receiver" of some sort. (In earlier times, people were calling this entity a soul. My personal impression is that theories wanting to explain consciousness through Unexplainable Quantum Stuff are mostly continuing this very old worldview and dress it up in modern scientific terminology)

If consciousness was "just" an emergent result of certain neural interactions and memories - with no physical "secret sauce" needed - then there is no known fundamental reason (yet) why that same kind of emergence couldn't take place inside an LLM.

[IWeldMelons]

First of all, just for sake of discussion, it is not normal to try prove negative statements. In any case it is hard to make definitive arguments about phenomena observable internally, such as qualia.

Now, we can make reasonable claims that

1. we are conscious systems,

2. we are very complex physical systems, far exceeding complexity of LLMs.

3. LLM only very superficially resemble real human itelligence, not even close, hallucinate left and right, get easily off the track.

3. Higher animals, primate and espercially very low IQ people, anything that have neural networks resembling all show obvious signs of consciousness.

Emergent properties by the way do not cut, because if you squint enough you'll see that emergent properties do not exist without an intelligent observer, without intepretation. Say, emergent property of bird flocks; well the whole idea of bird flock is figment of human imagination, physical world does not have birds, let alone flocks. So consciousness can be "emergent" in typical sense of the word, it can be the result of working neural network, but it will be forever closed to analysis, as it is by definition outside of externally observable world.