The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.
Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input."
Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia.
But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia.
So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse.
So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input".
But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.
If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.
When ridiculous narratives like Christianity feel worn and outdated, we make up new ridiculous narratives like panpsychism.
I would say "organic machine p-zombies with no real truly conscious experience with an operative system built on random, ridiculous, changing narratives. A machine that randomly stops working then other organic machines burn or bury it."
The fact I can believe this and still enjoy life so much really is a miracle in the Christian sense.
These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
[1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...