As for the article, I am actually doing 1 - 2 min shikantaza regularly while working. I'm staring at an empty screen. I do it multiple times per hour regardless if I feel focused or not.

* Don't try to fix the posture while attempting shikantaza.

** Obviously something even more practical for a beginner is to gain focus by counting breaths and then breath awareness, before trying the most difficult type of zazen. I'm just describing what would be a way for someone that does not practice to imagine what correct shikantaza feels like.

Obviously, language-driven thought is not a requirement for consciousness, not just in other animals, but even in humans. The thinking mind takes a secondary role in ordinary daily human life. The truth is that a human being behaves the way they do is not because of thoughts, but because of conditioning (the thoughts are not the primary driver of decisions, actions and behavior). The 99% of the action and responses are trained, the thoughts that we have are also part of this conditioning (most thoughts are unconscious and they are inter-wired with the behaviors, even a seemingly conscious self-reflection thought can be an automated pavlovian trigger). For example, one may think that they get up and go to work because they have a thought "I have to get up, now I am going to go to work", this is an illusion and complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is. Or one can have a psychological insight about oneself, if it's repeated and follows a behavior consistently, the very thought is just the equivalent of whistle-salivation. The thinking mind gives us that 1% to self-reflect, adjust our behavior, learn, predict the future and that differentiates us from other mammals, it's a powerful tool, but just a tool, but it should not be confused with consciousness and it should not be confused with the mind as a whole (in the materialistic sense). The way our brain functions is anything but like an AI agent. And what is consciousness? It's not the thinking mind. It's the experience. It's the direct perception of the senses. The consciousness is what is seen, heard, smelled, touched, thought (the experience of having a thought) in the moment. When you practice meditation, you get to discover the consciousness directly by becoming separated from the thinking thread. The thinking thread becomes more like an external tool, like a computer inside you and you realize directly that it's just a part of the cognitive faculty that makes you navigate your life, not the entire thing.

The LLM (and the harnesses) as built right now merely simulate the tool (the thinking mind). It's not that because this is some code ran on a beefy, but regular piece of tech invented in 20th century you may have at your desk that it does not have awareness (that's also a good argument), but because the way they function and operate is nothing like human (or mammalian) brain, then why would you think that regular code running on a regular PC could gain awareness? My point is that there's no similarity argument, LLMs, despite all their incredible capabilities (to threaten our jobs), are not remotely similar to the way our brain works.

Secondly, even if someone built an artificial brain made of whatever that simulates the biological structure, because of the philosophical zombie problem (the fact that there's no way to scientifically observe consciousness), you could never be too sure if a key ingredient was not missing and you are looking at an NPC. The consciousness is not a property of the physical brain, it's literally immaterial, it's the direct experience of the senses. You can make an optimistic assumption that every person and animal experiences consciousness the same way you do, but there's no way to rationally accept this assumption for anything created artificially.