if you look at https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer
It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.
As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"
It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.
Quantum physics is also Turing computable and therefore an algorithm.
To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.
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"Sentience could be algorithmically obtained" is a much weaker claim than "LLMs are almost sentient."
We've had computers that can do anything computers can do for as long as we've had computers.
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