What does it mean to assume consciousness has no manifestation even in the case of humans? Is that denying that we have an experience of sensation like colors, sounds, or that we experience dreaming, memories, inner dialog, etc?

That's prima facie absurd on the face of it, so I don't know what it means. You would have to a philosophical zombie to make such an argument.

Yes, worms think, let the computers have thinking too, the philosophers can still argue all they want about consciousness.

Humans are special, we emit meaning the way stars emit photons, we are rare in the universe as far as empirical observation has revealed. Even with AGI the existence of each complex meaning generator will be a cosmic rarity.

For some people that seems to be not enough, due to their factually wrong word views they see themselves as common and worthless (when they empirically aren't) and need this little psychological boost of unexaminable metaphysical superiority.

But there is an issue of course, the type of thinking humans do is dangerous but net positive and relatively stable, we have a long history where most instantiations of humans can persist and grow themselves and the species as a whole, we have a track record.

These new models do not, people have brains that as they stop functioning they stop persisting the apparatus that supports the brain and they die, people tend to become less capable and active as their thinking deteriorates and hold less influence ocer others accept in rare cases.

This is not the case for an LLM, they seem to be able to hallucinate endlessly and as they have access to the outside world maintain roughly their same amount of causal leverage, their clarity and accuracy of their thinking isn't tied to their persisting.