I see your points - So I'll call in an outside expert to help my case:
MIT Technology Review
"The World's best known consciousness researcher says machines could one day become self aware"
"Is a worm conscious? How about a bumblebee? Does a computer that can play chess “feel” anything?
To Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, the answer to these questions may lie in the fabric of the universe itself. Consciousness, he believes, is an intrinsic property of matter, just like mass or energy. Organize matter in just the right way, as in the mammalian brain, and
voilà, you can feel.
So you think a computer can be conscious?
I gave a lecture [last week] at MIT about Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin. This is a theory that makes a very clear prediction: it says that consciousness is a property of complex systems that have a particular “cause-effect” repertoire. They have a particular way of interacting with the world, such as the brain does, or in principle, such as a computer could. If you were to build a computer that has the same circuitry as the brain, this computer would also have consciousness associated with it. It would feel like something to be this computer. However, the same is not true for digital simulations.
If I build a perfect software model of the brain, it would never be conscious, but a specially designed machine that mimics the brain could be?
Correct........
I am not saying consciousness is a magic soul. It is something physical. Consciousness is always supervening onto the physical. But it takes a particular type of hardware to instantiate it. A computer made up of transistors, moving charge on and off a gate, with each gate being connected to a small number of other gates, is just a very different cause-and-effect structure than what we have in the brain, where you have one neuron connected to 10,000 input neurons and projecting to 10,000 other neurons. But if you were to build the computer in the appropriate way, like a neuromorphic computer [see “
Thinking in Silicon”], it could be conscious."
See whole article here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531146/what-it-will-take-for-computers-to-be-conscious/
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Also:
"Minds Everywhere: Panpsychism Takes Hold in Science"
"SAN FRANCISCO — Are humans living in a simulation? Is consciousness nothing more than the firing of neurons in the brain? Or is consciousness a distinct entity that permeates every speck of matter in the universe?.........
"The answer to the question "
what is consciousness" could have implications for the future of
artificial intelligence (AI) and far-out concepts like mind uploading and virtual immortality, said
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, the creator, writer and host of "Closer to Truth." [
Superintelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]'
Materialism to panpsychism
"Philosophers have put forward many notions of consciousness. The materialist notion holds that consciousness can be fully explained by the the firing of neurons in
the human brain, while mind-body dualism argues that the soul or mind is distinct from, and can potentially outlive, the body. Under the notion of panpsychism, a kind of re-boot of ancient animistic ideas, every speck of matter has a kind of proto-consciousness. When aggregated in particular ways, all this proto-consciousness turns into a sense of inner awareness. And other, Eastern philosophies have held that consciousness is the only real thing in the universe, Kuhn said.
Neuroscientists and many philosophers have typically planted themselves firmly on the materialist side. But a growing number of scientists now believe that materialism cannot wholly explain the sense of "I am" that undergirds consciousness, Kuhn told the audience.
One of those scientists is Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. At the event, he described a relatively recent formulation of consciousness called the
integrated information theory. The idea, put forward by University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, argues that consciousness resides in an as-yet-unknown space in the universe.
Integrated information theory measures consciousness by a metric, called phi, which essentially translates to how much power over itself a being or object has.
"If a system has causal power upon itself, like the brain does, then it feels like something. If you have a lot of causal power upon yourself, then it feels like a lot to be you," Koch said.........
To create truly conscious AI, researchers may need to develop technologies that can act upon themselves, perhaps more akin to
neuromorphic computers, Koch said. (Such computers would operate without any pre-programmed code, instead somehow sensing and reacting to changes in their own physical states.)........"
See whole article here:
https://www.livescience.com/53791-what-is-consciousness.html
"“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
― Max Planck
"“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
― Max Planck