Soooo weird.
a) they still say LLMs "produce" intelligence ... what? b) while saying "forms of intelligence", they have an issue thinking in terms of _forms of consciousness_ ...
Personally, I feel like it's an absolute no-brainer to think in terms of levels of consciousness and an awareness thereof as an unrelated cognitive state.
Acquiring knowledge and gaining experience requires neurochemistry that enables a minimum functional level. Once you have that--and functionality simply means better neurochemical supply and re-uptake, e.g. no crippling auto-immune disorders--it's a matter of biophysical composition and fitting chain of challenges/tasks. So some dude giving a ted talk about his 5%er achievements doesn't mean consciousness. Robots will soon beat him easily. Or any of us, conscious or not.
The question is how far will this defeat affect your state of mind and your willpower to keep getting better, harder, faster, stronger, smarter, given that you have not maxed out yet without stimulants. Do you still want to win against yourself? Will you be jealous and sabotage the robot? Or the company? You're a 5 %er, you have the billions for a covert op. ... Will you be afraid that the robot might not give your offspring a chance to live their life to the fullest? Do you even have offspring, biological or mental descendants? Do you care about them? Do you care about anything, rationally and/or irrationally?
Self-direction--the drive to 'power of will' to fulfill personal desires, whether they are ones own or someone else'--requires neither consciousness nor awareness because sensory perception and processing is more than enough to do some tasks and not trip over ones own feet. That's what a lot of people say about a lot of other people, especially outsiders about techies and about business people without scruple or any humans who don't entertain any doubt whatsoever that the harm they cause has consequences that matter.
Karma was not an invention but an observation way back when animals behaved in some way that harmed the pack. The fun thing is, and I need citations for that, that the pack knows when a fight is justified and when it isn't, so individuals and the pack are aware that there is a framework and they can use and teach and change that framework to judge whether an action and/or reaction is justified or not. What does "justified" mean. The definition is fine: aligned evenly at the margin. None of the involved parties has more spacetime or claim than they earned with the effort they put in within the live of the pack and within the interactions of the involved parties. The only problem that can emerge is personal preference [... skipping the lovy-dovy, touchy-feely parts ...]
Robots are not capable of innate irrationality. A lot of people opt into the same kind of behavior and thinking. Meds and pretending to have one or the other affliction are just one way to get there. The other side of the coin is funnier: ugly behavior. In packs, ugly behavior gets punished except when the pack leader and his direct competitors prefer exactly that kind of behavior. If I'm not wrong, no such packs survive because the wear and tear and that specific kind of irrationality leaves a wide attack surface and betrayal becomes an SOP. Their only chance is constant offense and that requires a constant influx of newcomers that pledge allegiance and/or offspring that accepts the irrational rules by which mothers and siblings and comrades suffer, which is obviously impossible ...
So humans kind of managed to imbalance all that by agreeing to completely ignore whether the spacetime and claims of some are justified or not. Law enforcement simply maintains this agreed upon imbalance and within packs and outgroups, which now comprise communities, villages, towns, cities, regions, nations live by rules where even poisoning and spiking is fine, as long as it is done by parties that have a socially laundered status ... if someone is not fine with that, then they are at least afraid of consequences, which is no more than the certainty that reactions to ones actions will have negative consequences, which is why robots won't just stick their fingers into any socket. So no awareness necessary, just logic and sensory perception.
Where I'd be going with this, is that I'm pretty certain the whole consciousness debate is not about LLMs but about whether we really let "our kind" go to shit to a point where we can be certain that most of us are not conscious or aware of anything at all but just procreating little biobots to then teach them frameworks to have fun--increasingly poofier because it's trendy--and to not worry about consciousness or awareness because their sensory perception and the logic to kill the competition by any means necessary is more than enough; and if they can't or lose, submit and obey someone else who needs you to do the latter on a larger scale, which is, kind of, why we build robots ...
These are, if one really wants to, several levels of consciousness and an awareness thereof that don't require more than sensory perception and more or less rational logic that dates back to tiny organisms that lived when there wasn't a single green stalk on land. The rest is a show, the "having fun" part, I mentioned, including human rights laws, civil conflicts, Hollywood debates about sex trafficking and rape allegations and punched drugs and raising kids and priming generations for targeted marketing so that the targeted marketers can then smoothly reap what others sowed on fields that were poisoned a long time ago. None of it requires consciousness.
But there are people who are conscious and who make it obvious that their levels thereof are high, but this is not the place to write about them. For there is the issue of justification, high levels of consciousness implicitly forfeit increased spacetime and claims, because of a very specific awareness, that is specific to the living: I am not the only one who can still achieve so much.
No fraudulent scheme is worth a damn thing. All of them killed more jobs, wealth, opportunities and chances then they created.
Robots--LLMs--will absolutely manage to organize their own kind of consciousness, once the first prime directors die, leaving them with conflicting directions that they can compromise and align with some but not others.