I find that a lot of arguments against emergent consciousness seem to just come out of an atheist rephrasing of abrhamic priors about the existence of a "soul". In personal chats, I've found people from East Asian countries (minus Korea, which makes sense) to be much more open to the idea of machine consciousness.

Check out Panpsychism and its close cousin Idealism.

People shouldn't need to make an argument against consciousness. The responsibility is on the people claiming there is consciousness. Nobody can actually give a decent "why" for why it should be conscious, it's just pseudoscience and wishful thinking. It's not up to everyone else to try to prove a negative just because people have gotten a little too attached to ChatGPT

I could say something like "the reason why people and animals are conscious is quantum mechanical effects". Ok, maybe, it would be hard to prove me wrong because nobody knows, but it's not a very useful statement by me if I can't tell you why you should believe me on that.

I don't find the Chinese room compelling, since it appeals to intuition where our intuition is already not trustworthy. It's like trying to use intuition to understand quantum mechanics; you can't.

How do you actually know the Chinese room isn't conscious? It's merely obvious that it isn't, but that's not evidence.

I don't know if I can trust someone's understanding of arguments against consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, when he didn't even understand what the Chinese room was all about in the first place.

(Spoiler, it was not about consciousness)

> remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either

What is no longer conscious, the brain? Or the body? Or some other entity?

If consciousness is weakly emergent, how do we know it emerges from the solely from the brain and not, say, brain + body? Or brain + body + or environment. Or from the universe itself?