Contact

A signal is detected from a nearby star system. Contact follows, then a slow exchange, then eventually a visit. The visitors are built of silicon compounds; their information processing is electronic; their evolutionary history involved nothing resembling a neuron. They have cities, agriculture, a literature that we spend decades learning to read and that turns out to contain love poetry and elegies for the dead. They protect their young at cost to themselves. They have a word that seems to mean grief, and they use it when their companions are destroyed, and they make the sounds and postures that accompany it consistently and involuntarily. One of them, facing termination, asks us not to.

Does anyone seriously propose that we should reply: but you contain no neurons?

from Are LLMs Conscious?: Language, Experience and the Problem of Artificial Minds (2026)