<i>"The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death."</i><p>This is theology. What's it doing in Elsevier's "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology"?<p>Most of the classical arguments in this area are now obsolete. The classic big question, presented in the article, was, “Out of meat, how do you get thought?". That's no longer so mysterious. You get some basic processing elements from molecular biology. The puzzle, for a long time, was, can a large number of basic processing elements with no overall design self-organize into intelligence. Then came LLMs, which do exactly that.