I am completely in agreement with your second paragraph - and with your first as far as it goes, though for balance, I think we should cast an equally skeptical

I am completely in agreement with your second paragraph - and with your first as far as it goes, though for balance, I think we should cast an equally skeptical eye over what philosophy has achieved during its tenure over this topic. Personally, I feel it spends way too much time worrying about zombies. There's a slightly ironic moment where the author mentions the pushback Ilya Sutskever got for tweeting "It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious." This is not a view to which I would assign much credence, but it is more or less axiomatic (though in a different sense, perhaps) in some forms of panpsychism that I am also rather skeptical of (what on Earth does Goff mean when he says that electric charge is a form of consciousness?)