Agreed. One distinction that I've found people have trouble in debates regarding lamda is separating the idea that any billion parameter ML algorithm could be c

Agreed. One distinction that I've found people have trouble in debates regarding lamda is separating the idea that any billion parameter ML algorithm could be conscious vs lamda in particular being conscious. I think the jury's out on the former (I'd bet you could create a reactive embodied agent with learned environmental goals in <1B parameters given the right setup, which is at least a stepping stone), but for the reasons you describe here, lamda could only be considered conscious by a definition so broad as to declare all digital computation as conscious, and the reasons for that come down to understanding the network architecture and prediction task.