This does not in any way prove that LLMs aren't sentient. Feels like a joke paper. I mean not a completely unserious one but one that's has been written with a lot of smirk.

The actual author explains it way better though: https://adriandewynter.substack.com/p/if-llms-have-human-like-attributes

I obviously didn't understand everything, but it seems to me that he built an LLM in AoE2 goats and basically said "look, obviously this isn't concious" and that "obviously" is doing much more work than it should. Reductio ad absurdum.

Obviously the LLM built in AoE2 goats is conscious.