You seem to believe that wet neural nets are conscious because of some internal property that artificial neural nets lack. After all, it's still 1's and 0's in the CPU, no consciousness there.

But I think this view is naive. Consciousness doesn't come from the network, be it biological or silicon, it comes from the process of acting. You got to be able to act and have a body, be situated in the environment, have goals and needs that inform your actions. This whole game surrounding the agent creates consciousness. It's not just in the brain, it's extended in the environment. You can put a language model in an android body and make it conscious.