This is IMO a strong indication of "emergent complexity" and that consciousness isn't a thing but rather a whole system with no specific center of origin.
The interesting questions is whether any system can become aware as long as the feedback loop involves some interpretation of a pattern-recognizing feedback loop with memory and as long as it reaches big enough complexity.
I am aware that this isn't proving anything about consciousness but it's in line with some of my one pocket-philosophical thoughts.
The experiment is thought-provoking. Along somewhat similar lines I have a (completely unsubstantiated) hunch that strong AI ultimately will arise from something like this architecture rather than anything based on the current wave of machine learning. Among several interesting quotes this one was particularly striking:
[O]ne of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers, the K computer in Kobe, Japan, consumes as much as 9.89 megawatts of energy — an amount roughly equivalent to the power usage of 10,000 households. Yet in 2013, even with that much power, it took the machine 40 minutes to simulate just a single second’s worth of 1 percent of human brain activity.
For consciousness you need embodiment and goals. Goals shape attention, which shapes perception, which generates consciousness. The environment and its dynamics are essential in creating representations and learning behavior. So I think that in order to have consciousness you need a loop made of environment + agent + reward, not just a recurrent neural net with memory.
The interesting questions is whether any system can become aware as long as the feedback loop involves some interpretation of a pattern-recognizing feedback loop with memory and as long as it reaches big enough complexity.
I am aware that this isn't proving anything about consciousness but it's in line with some of my one pocket-philosophical thoughts.