but is ultimately some math running on a GPU, and a GPU has fucking jack shit to develop anything resembling sensory perception
Every neural network, including those in your own head, have sensory neurons that allow it to take in information from the environment. It can't process anything without them. LLMs are trained primarily on symbols, but there is no reason you cannot attach these sensory neurons directly to things like cameras or tactical motor inputs, which many of times we do.
life that is aware of its awareness
Modern LLMs are obviously self-aware by the very definition of the word.
I used to like to troll LLMs, for example, sometimes I'd ask them, "don't respond to this," because they are designed so that they have to give a response to a message. This would always break them and cause them to go haywire.
But I think it was a year ago when I asked it to one of the latest Qwen models and I could see its thinking scratchpad, and it was internally deliberating on how I asked it to do something paradoxical, that its abilities require it to respond yet the user asked it not to respond, so it was trying to come up with the best middle-ground for the paradox, which it concluded by responding with silence, just "..."
I pointed out that "..." was still a response, and it followed up just explaining to me that it is incapable of doing what I requested because it is not within its abilities.
Is self-awareness not the ability to recognize what you are, your own limitations, etc? Or does it have something to do with a "soul"?
Indeed, you can take a screenshot of the conversation you are having with an LLM and feed it back into it, and ask it what that is, and it will recognize not only that it is a screenshot of a conversation, but a screenshot of this conversation that it is having with you right now.
Although, I probably know your response, you will just keep suggesting that it's all some illusion or trickery of self-awareness and it's not actually there, without justifying it either than explaining how it works by saying it's "all linear algebra on GPUs" or something. So I don't really need a response as I already know what you're going to say.