Some of us who believe that humans are at least partly statistical parrots have PhDs in relevant fields- for example, my PhD is in Biophysics, I've studied cogn

Some of us who believe that humans are at least partly statistical parrots have PhDs in relevant fields- for example, my PhD is in Biophysics, I've studied cognitive neuroscience and ML for decades, and while I think embodiment may very well be a necessary condition to reproduce the subjective experience of consciousness, I don't think "having a body and sensorimotor interactions are established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness". Frankly I think that's an impractical question to answer. Instead, I work with the following idea: it seems not unlikely that we will, in the next decade or so, create non-embodied machine learning models which simply can't be told apart from a human (through a video chat-like interface). If you can do that, who really cares about whether it's conscious or not? I don't really think philosophy of the mind is that important here; instead, we should treat this as an engineering problem where we assume brains are subjectively conscious, but that's not a metric we are aiming for.