> Rather, there exists a popular intuitive dualism that suggests our own consciousness must be more than an emergent neurological phenomenon
I don't get a challenge of consciousness as something else than an emergent neurological phenomenon. The problem is by what mechanism does it emerge. Animals without language show sign of consciousness (even if more limited form), and conversely high level computation does not especially in the light of the capabilities of LLMs (computers are crushing numbers identically no matter if the matrix multiplications are for rendering a scene or LLM inference, otherwise it would mean that some arbitrary sequences of numbers lead to consciousness like magic formulas). That leaves only something physical/biological to explain the emerging phenomenon, which is what the research is trying to do.
I don't get a challenge of consciousness as something else than an emergent neurological phenomenon. The problem is by what mechanism does it emerge. Animals without language show sign of consciousness (even if more limited form), and conversely high level computation does not especially in the light of the capabilities of LLMs (computers are crushing numbers identically no matter if the matrix multiplications are for rendering a scene or LLM inference, otherwise it would mean that some arbitrary sequences of numbers lead to consciousness like magic formulas). That leaves only something physical/biological to explain the emerging phenomenon, which is what the research is trying to do.