alt Hacker NewsI think you're missing his point. It's not about the hormones and physics of our bodies, and indeed he specifically allows for "either physical or virtual" bodies even in the block ~~~you~~~ grandparent quoted.
The point here is not that it must have a body like ours, the point is that a conscious entity must have a boundary line between internal (the body) and external (everything else).
A virtual sense organ can simply be an encoder or a web camera or a magnetometer, the specifics don't matter, what matters is that there are only a few bridges between the outer world and the inner world.
Even if you want to call a tokenizer and autoencoder a "sense organ", LLMs are not embodied because there is no boundary line - there is no internal "thought" that is not directly descended from the prompt and there is no internal reasoning which is not immediately dumped into the external environment.
Would it be sufficient to have a second stream of tokens that becomes the model's equivalent of "internal dialogue"? Would that satisfy the requirement of a boundary line?
Related, is a human "thinking out loud" still thinking, even though the internal reasoning is "immediately dumped into the external environment"?