"As Edelman put it in a conversation back in 2004, well before the notion that artificial neural networks and large language models could one day produce consciousness:
“The brain is embodied, and the body is embedded in its environment. That trio must operate in an integrated way. You can’t separate the activity and development of the brain from the environment or the body. There is a constant interplay between what is remembered and envisioned — an image — and what is actually happening in the senses"
“The most important thing to understand is that the brain is ‘context-bound’. It is not a logical system like a computer that processes only programmed information; it does not produce preordained outcomes like a clock.”
Unlike computers, even computers running neural network algorithms, brains are the kinds of things for which it is difficult, and likely impossible, to separate what they do from what they are.
An article on NOEMA magazine: Only What Is Alive Can Be Conscious - Artificial intelligence doesn’t meet the test (By Nathan Gardels).