Also, if bozo could please explain how trained oral historians and poets can recall thousands of stanzas of poetry verbatim with few or no errors I’d love to hear that, because it raises some questions about the dollar bill “experiment”.

Through learned, embodied habit. They know it in their bones and muscles. It isn’t the mechanical reproduction of a computer or machine.

Imo I don’t think we could ever “upload a brain” and even if we did, it would be a horrific subjective experience. So much of our sense of self and of consciousness is learned and developed over time through being in the world as a body. Losing a limb has a significant impact on someones consciousness, phantom limbs which can hurt, imagine losing your entire body. This thought experiment is still under the assumption that the brain alone is the entire seat of conscious experience, which is doubtful as this just falls into a mind/body dualism under the idea that the brain is a CPU which could be simply plugged into something else.

Could there be an emergent conscious AI at some point? Perhaps, but as far as we can tell it may very well require a kind of childhood and slow development of embodied experience in a similar capacity to how any known lifeform becomes conscious. Not a human brain shoved into a vat.