It's almost starting to look like the way to make progress is not to stick electrodes into biological systems and measure a few dozen neurons to try and reverse engineer biological consciousness.

Might actually be easier to create artificial consciousness such that we can actually measure and more closely study what is happening.

The biological approach is fiendishly difficult. If we can barely understand how an LLVM is working, what chance do we have of trying to understand one by only looking at the raw electrical output few dozen transistors from a machine running one.