“Consciousness is functionally the equivalent of hooking a bunch of jumper cables up to tissue and having that tissue start to ask existential questions about the nature of reality... it makes no sense. You can watch ions hop across synaptic junctions, you can follow nerve impulses from nose to toes—nothing in any of those purely mechanical processes would lead any reasonable person to expect the emergence of subjective awareness.”
— peter watts, conscious ants and human hives