Yes - emergence is the relatively straightforward observation that large systems can have complex features that are not discernible at the detailed level. My go

Yes - emergence is the relatively straightforward observation that large systems can have complex features that are not discernible at the detailed level. My go-to example is Darwinian fitness, which is not discernible at the atomic level. The trickiest part of making a large neural network conscious would be in how you train it. Our brains have been trained by a half-billion years of evolution since the first neurons emerged, and while evolution is slow, that's still a long time.