I’ll stress again. You can in principle make an artificial brain out of something inorganic. It needs to duplicate the processes in the brain that cause consciousness. Biology points the way because brains cause minds. The depiction in Ex Machina of a blue glowing thing is apt.
Ah ok. But then which processes specifically does it need to replicate? What if it merely needs to develop priors over key and query vectors and Attention is truly All You Need? Are axons and dendrites prerequisites for consciousness? Do you need myelin sheaths for a sense of "my"? Or Golgi bodies to contemplate God?
Seems you both agree that consciousness (and it's value?) has something to do with "sense of self"(?) From what I can gather, Sam uses the conditions of his own sense of self (ie, biology) to hypothesize about whether others could have such a sense(?) While Connor may be using beings' own outputs as the evidence(?)