I don't know anything about this domain but I wholeheartedly believe consciousness to be an emergent phenomena that arises in what we may as well call "spontaneously" out of other non-conscious phenomena.

If you apply this rule to machine learning, why can a neural network and it's model not have emergent properties and behavior too?

(Maybe you can't, I dunno, but my toddler-level analogy wants to look at this way)