[photochemsyn]

I don't see how you can have human-like consciousness without (1) a sense of self and (2) a certain degree of agency. Self-awareness is different from mechanical responses: thinking "The sun is warm, the sun is getting hot, I will move my physical body out of the sun to avoid overheating" is fundamentally different from a robot or a microbe doing the same thing in response to triggers from sensors.

This leads to the interesting question, can you simulate consciousness in a virtual in-silico world setting? Can you create an entity that inhabits this virtual world, taking in simulated sensory data, from which it orients itself, learns to speak a language, develops symbolic representations of reality in its own mind which it uses to navigate and understand its world - would that be human-level consciousness? And if so, is this an ethical undertaking?