It is wholly consistent to believe that your actual parrots are also statistical parrots. That's not the same thing as "can't be convinced".
I do, however, appreciate your point and agree with the spirit of your post, if not the exact content.
I definitely feel like I am two 'selves' - one of which is capable of rational thought, foresight, rational modeling of the world around me, etc. That self is probably running things 25% of the time. The other self is emotional, understands the world intuitively for all of the benefits and drawbacks that carries, and seeks short term satisfaction of needs above all else.
I don't mean this in a hand-wavey new age holistic way, I mean it in a very concrete sense. I can detect that change in myself when I switch from the 'monkey pilot' to the 'human pilot'. Mindfulness and concentration is required to bring the human back. I think I have below average executive functioning skills, and I spend a lot of my 'human pilot' time thinking about how I can stay in this mode longer but it's not trivial to make that happen.
I think my 'human pilot' is definitely sentient. My 'monkey pilot' might not be depending on the definition.
If anything, LLMs have exposed our inconsistency in how we ground sentience, consciousness, and subjective experience. At times we thought we were talking about the same things, but we've clearly have been tossing terms about.
LLMs have, at least/last, given us the opportunity to reexamine important social ontologies. Better late than never.
I believe I've seen an article touching this topic here, long before GPT. Will link if I find it
The only description I've ever seen of consciousness that makes any sense is that it's a kind of condition monitoring system for our minds, a cross-check evolved to catch some of the cognitive mistakes that the main machinery of our minds tend to make from time to time. And because our whole brain is linked into this system, including itself, we get that infinite regress of omphaloskepsis that we call "consciousness."
I don't do a lot of metacognition (thinking about my thinking) while I'm in a flow state, which maybe was your point. But I can think about my prior flow state thinking after the fact, and I'm aware of how much my mind was working, and what that felt like.
In other words, consciousness is an emergent phenomena that happens in a system of sending messages when eventually an agent starts sending messages to itself. "you" are the voices in your head not attributed to anyone else.
One way to see this is that sentience and language processing are just two aspects available to us in consciousness.
We are also not identical to our thoughts or feelings, but most people never pause to contemplate this.
I suspect the autopilot you describe is really closer to our default state, but it’s easier to notice when in a calm state and the “me-ness” of actions/thoughts doesn’t feel so strong.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who...