[pigeonwarz]

I'm going to go on a limb here and challenge this assumption. As a parallel thread to the point put forward by michael1999, can we not argue words manifest as the result of the maths performed within LLMs, maths that, for all intents and purposes, is their world? Because the internal maths of how LLMs work is likely to be significantly cruder than the 'real' world that defines consciousness, perhaps we are closer to the ghost in the machine than we would like to admit.