So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.
1. that artificial neurons are very restrictive model for actual neurons, let alone brain/organism, as there is more going on in neurons than a thresholded 0-1 activation
2. a brain does not function in isolation, but as regulator of the bodily functions (along with even more things). If you look at the brain in isolation to the body you don't really understand fully what it is doing unless you narrow your view a lot. Eg the brain modulates production of hormones, which in turn affects stuff like heart rate which then comes back to the brain as signal, in a feedback loop. Not to mention actual behaviour and interaction with the world. Toy models of organisms are not organisms.
3. "interaction between atoms" (or rather matter in general, as we have to take into account electrons, photons, gravity and a lot of other things that matter) is too general, too big, artificial neurons are a very useful (for applications) abstraction inspired by biological processes, but not modelling said underlying biology fully. Nobody can imo right now know if "computation" is a good model for "atom interactions" as in whether we can adequately enough model "atom interactions" in a computationally tractable way, and surely we do not do that right now except in very narrow scopes, and we have good reasons to believe that the current computational paradigms/turing machines are inadequate in doing that efficiently enough.
You say this based on what? Your brain is executing instructions on wetware. The entire universe is governed by physical laws.
At its base, the argument that computers can't be conscious is dualist. It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.
> the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.
It seems to me that you're denigrating LLMs, or implying that they're only simulating thought, as opposed to actually thinking. But the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing. It's a bit like the Mitchell and Webb skit about faking the moon landings, in which the plotters quickly realize that the only way to convincingly fake landing on the moon is to fly a rocket to the moon and film the "fake" landings on the moon.
I say it based on the fact that I experience consciousness and therefore know it is a phenomenon wholly separate from the outward effect I have on the world via speech or any other physical action.
>It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.
Ruling this out completely implies that modern science has a total and complete understanding of consciousness and the universe in its entirety, which it does not. I don't think it's unreasonable to leave open the possibility that there is an unexplained phenomenon that explains the conscious experience which is still bounded by the laws of physics.
>.. the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing.
Do they? To me it seems like you equate the process with the result, like saying if I gave you a gift, it doesn't matter whether I bought it or made it by hand, in either case I "made" it because the end result is the same. There is a conscious experience that (hopefully) all humans experience and can testify to, the question is whether or not an LLM predicting tokens based on a giant vector map is experiencing the same thing, which I'd say is obviously not happening. My point about chatbots is about exactly this -- 10 years ago even you would have laughed at somebody that said a hand-rolled chatbot was conscious/thinking, but because the output has improved, now suddenly it's all the same, and your brain is a computer, and Claude has feelings, blah blah.
It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.
