Thanks for this piece. Are you familiar with the work of Antonio Damasio? I've read a few of his books. He seems to be suggesting that emergent behavior is consciousness. I wonder how that is perceived in the neuroscience community. I think he was or is on the faculty of UCSD (my alma mater).

I interpret what he says to mean that some neural networks produce a conscious state for other neural networks. He talks a lot about neural networks creating maps for other neural networks, which reads these maps, where no consciousness is involved, which suggests a map that a neural network reads as subjective experience (qualia?). This seems plausible to me. Ironically, this also suggests that consciousness is an illusion (although based on input from the physical world). Your thoughts?