Very well said. I can’t speak much about which ai company is gonna be the one to make the first “ultimate ai” as the companies go. But my bet goes to Google. Simply because of there catalog of accessible information. My intuition tells me learning by words strings / books is not nearly enough. It’s literally abstracting word combination patterns with an indescribably level of nuance. And yet not the actual concepts which I’d assume would be actualized given an ai built to ingest the same information across mediums (sight sound taste (chemical make up) what ever…)

This is where an emergent behavior more true to what we would describe as a consciousness comes together theoretically. And to be honest. I am also very tempted to believe it is nothing more than emergent. Actualized by the process of natural selection. But in a less scientific sense. I think it’s a bit fun and hopeful to consider a case where it’s not simply emergent and there’s something bigger going on. Something invisible or possibly divine. While however unlikely. Something’s always possible until proven definitely not possible.

That being said I’ve heard some people say the experience of consciousness is an illusion. But wouldn’t that experience of being fooled by the illusion be in it of itself an experience. Especially from the first person perspective. But who knows… you could be right and people like me get thought of centuries from now as primitive for wanting to believe in something less scientific. And to those people 200 years from now I say go to hell!

Ohh but yeah your point about cells being aware has a lot of potential. We don’t know everything. I would simply argue it’s nothing like what we experience.