Personally, I’m partial to the higher-order theory of consciousness which postulates that consciousness constitutes patterns of thought that arise in response to first-order mental states. So, an external stimulus produces a pattern within the neural network which represents a sensation, and then if a pattern arises in response to that pattern, that is an experience of that sensation. Given this framework we could ask whether LLMs experience higher order patterns in response to external stimulus. We would have a clear question to ask which is whether the system can observe itself.