Oh I completely agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear enough! Consciousness is so arbitrary that I find it not useful as a concept: one can define it whatever purpose it’s supposed to serve. That’s what I tried to describe with the skynet thingy: it doesn’t matter for the end result if I call it conciense or not. The question is how I personally alter my behavior (i.e. I say “please” and “thanks” even though I am aware that in theory this will not “improve” performance of an LLM - I do that because if I interact with anyone or - thing in a natural language I want to keep my natural manners).