Consider that in thinking, it may be the way something is done rather than what is done which determines whether it occurs or not. ai has traditionally stuck to the “what is done” and seldom considered the “how it is done.”
I think from my perspective, the most important component may be the evidence physical determinism of the machine. Given an LLM with fixed weights, set of queries, server architecture, etc., it must respond the same way every single time. There is no free will coming from beyond/above purely physical sources. It seems that the important part for “thinking,” or more specifically “consciousness” (which are frequently conflated; are these the same?), arises not only from the output but from the *experience*, and the experience occurs to the part “beyond” the physical, i.e., the will or the soul. Since there are purely physical explanations for the machine’s output, and the soul or consciousness is not an emergent property of physical systems, an AI can never be conscious (at least as they are currently developed).
