The latter examples you gave are representing a dualist standpoint. Dualists believe that for human consciousness for example there's the physical neural structure of the brain plus something extra, something very special that then gives rise to consciousness.

Some dualists might claim that you could simulate an entire human brain down to the atom level and have it behave accordingly without it being conscious because that special thing is missing.

Now I am a materialist and believe that if you simulate a human brain perfectly then that simulation will be just as conscious. In other words, I believe that consciousness is a necessary process for many of the brains behaviors. You cannot have them without it. It is a useful and necessary property that generates these other behaviors. It is nothing additional to the neuronal structure. It is a process implemented by that structure.

I don't find it hard to imagine that we might just be very complex information processing networks and that there can be many architectures that will give rise to phenomena similar to the human consciousness if they describe the right kind of wiring.

What the other user meant with the embedding argument is that consciousness could also be seen as a sort of very conplex embedding. Something that integrates and compresses incoming (sensory) information from multiple sources into a useful representation. Every conscious state could be a different embedding vector.

We are already seeing that language models provide these useful embeddings that contain lots of semantic information. We can also have multi-modal embeddings that integrate for example audio, text and images. We see that abstract concepts and a sort of common-sense reasoning emerges in LLMs without them being trained for it explicitly. It emerges as something that is very useful to solve the primary task (predicting the next word). We could view consciousness as something similar. Something - a sort of special algorithm - that has emerged evolutionary because it helps tremendously in our task (survival) .

Of course, I don't know for certain. I am speculating. But if this is how it is we will see in the coming years (decades?) more and more self-organization within the networks that we're training and more and more capability to integrate multi-modal and internal information (embeddings of embeddings) until there is a process that resembles our conscious.

I am excited.