[infinite_spin]

You're conflating a singular model with a much larger system, but I want to address some of your points anyway.

> An LLM has a fixed number of ways it can express itself

While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.

> An LLM does not persist in consciousness from one token to the next

While a model alone does not update itself to persist some form of history, there are a number of ways to overcome this, e.g. episodic memory, fine-tuning, and other self-improvement systems exist, which can indeed carry forward what you've called "consciousness".

> Humans are not stateless like an LLM.

A single LLM might be stateless, but an agentic system that relies on LLMs is very often not.

[delusional]

> While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.

You're missing the point, which is that no matter the process involved. The LLM can only ever output one of the tokens in its token vector. It can't invent a new symbol or character. It can't leave and go build a church. It has to output a little piece of data for you.

[infinite_spin]

You're moving the goalpost. If the definition of intelligence is based on ability to "go build a church", then we've ruled out the vast majority of the animal kingdom from being labeled "intelligent". If you cannot be consistent in your definition of "intelligence", then you cannot have a reliable litmus test for it.

[delusional]

I wasn't trying to make a reliable litmus test for it.

Either way, if you consider animals, LLMs are even more poorly positioned. They can do exactly none of the things my cat can do. An LLM can string together words, but if my cat is intelligent, it's clear that stringing together words is not synonymous with intelligence, since my cat can't do that.

[infinite_spin]

Animals do in fact "string words together", e.g. parrots. You're also misidentifying what "language" is. Language in this context is not just the ability to string word together. Consider a musician, when they learn to play an instrument, they are learning the language of that instrument. Notes are tokens, ensembles are sentences and paragraphs. I'm afraid you're experiencing conformational bias, because every piece of evidence presented to you has been dismissed with things like "stringing together words is not synonymous with intelligence, since my cat can't do that".