I don't think there is a general consensus. In the 2020 Philpaper Survey roughly half of surveyed philosophers lean towards physicalism, roughly a third to non-physicalism, and the rest to something else.
That's one opinion out of many. Some say so, some say so.
But you did not answer my question on how we talk about ethics in terms of actions and brain scans.
The devil is in the details, and when you try to express why it is bad to kill people over a small argument in terms of actions etc., then you might find that this is not as simple as you insinuated.
"There is no 'ethic' in nature" is also easy said in the armchair, but becomes a lifeless abstraction pretty fast when confronted with real human suffering and tears.
I disagree. You can sense something using a thermostat. The thermostat is just a tool based on a functional relationship. "Sensing" has no literal, unequivocal use here.
That already presupposes a very narrow idea of what's meaningful that is quite far away from everyday life, where we talk about and evaluate subjective experiences all the time.
How do we talk about ethics in terms of actions, reactions abd brain scans please? That looks like an uncovered check.
In what sense are they a shorthand for actions in the world?
But what happens here, let me point that out for completeness, is not a dark conspiracy. At least not on this level.
People go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest thing that does the trick, probably because they can't afford something else. Bills want to be payed.
But isn't on the other hand the current AGI problem posed similar to the question "Are you not afraid that genetic engineers grow babies with bigger and bigger brains?"
We don't know if that won't break down somewhere. Looking at different examples it probably will. Scaling things infinitely is a pure math only concept it seems.
I think they are not actually intelligent. Fix all random seeds and other sources of randomness, and try the same prompt twice, and check how intelligent that looks, as a first approximation.
On a more technical level very serious people have voiced doubts, for example Richard Sutton in an interview with Dwarkash Patel [1].
An LLM generates plausible text token by token. It is at its core a deterministic function with some randomization and some clever tricks to make it look like an agent dialoguing or reasoning.
Plausible text sometimes is right, sometimes not.
Humans have a world model, a model of what happens. LLMs have a model of what humans would plausibly say.
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all