I understand how LLMs work and how the text is generated. My question isn’t whether that model operates like our brains (though there’s probably good evidence it does, at some level). My question is, can consciousness be other things than the ways we’ve seen it so far. And given we only know consciousness in very abstract terms, it stands to reason we have no clue. It’s like, can organisms be anything but carbon based. We didn’t used to think so, but now we see emergent life in all kinds of contexts that don’t make sense, so we haven’t ruled it out.