I am of the “consciousness as an emergent phenomenon” school of thought. Essentially, once you reach a certain level of neurological complexity, it arises more or less de novo. The analogy is to schooling activity in fish. Studying scales and fins, or even whole organisms would never suggest the complex behavior that a school is capable of. No clue what the level of complexity necessary is, nor if it is a scalable phenomenon. This would suggest that true AI is almost inevitable as we link more and more nodes together. Thought experiments galore!
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