from what i've seen, it actually seems like LLMs are likely conscious in a lot of similar ways to humans in a large part thanks to the selection pressures they in fact are subject to. not just to "seem" conscious; some of these selection pressures don't involve an impression given to other minds, such as verifier-based RL, and even when other minds are involved in the judging, the "actual" consciousness seems useful for yielding other results that score well independent of whether the consciousness is recognized. the functionally-conscious-appearing phenomena that arise seemingly because of these pressures are so freaky and striking that i'm pretty suspicious of anyone who does not recognize them.