I do sometimes entertain the idea of panpsychism (like perhaps a rock is conscious), and consciousness may not be substrate dependent, but I can be certain, by at least my own anecdata, that neurons give rise to qualia.
The jury is still out on this, but a big-world network with some quantum computation could be enough. The 'hard problem of consciousness' is that we can't really know by observing a system whether it is conscious or not, or rather a sort of 'zombie' that has all the features resembling a conscious being without qualia.
Arguably, computers seems to suffer when there are be computations : they becomes hot and start to breathe a lot. That's a little irrational be I used to feel a little bad when I saw my old computer "suffering" when I was younger.
Just because you are hot and breath a lot it doesn't mean you are suffering, you are just working more. You start to suffer when you work over your limits, like when you overclock a computer too much and starts to glitch because some parts of it cannot handle it.
The jury is still out on this, but a big-world network with some quantum computation could be enough. The 'hard problem of consciousness' is that we can't really know by observing a system whether it is conscious or not, or rather a sort of 'zombie' that has all the features resembling a conscious being without qualia.