Well, there is correlation between 'nearby' things of all types. An apple is an 'apple' because we encountered the word and the thing in close proximity to one

Well, there is correlation between 'nearby' things of all types. An apple is an 'apple' because we encountered the word and the thing in close proximity to one another temporally and perceptively many times during our life. All knowledge is this. Tremendously overlapping and filled with mistakes (spurious correlations induced by coincidence and happenstance), but fundamentally just that same 'insight'. Our brains are association machines. Once sufficient quantity of associations exist in a brain in a body living in a world we recognize, we call the property that results 'consciousness'. Unfortunately there is no reason to think that you can substract the 'in a body living in a world we recognize' part and end up with anything like the same property. All those associations come from perceptive inputs, and result in motive outputs, with the biofeedback that occurs being of profoundly fundamental importance (heck, put a pen in your mouth which causes your mouth to 'smile' and you will 'feel happier'). While of course there is definitely a possibility that a machine-based intelligence could be conscious, it would doubtless have to be very different from anything we could recognize, derived as it would be from its own input, output, and the feedback between the two.