How bout we think about consciousness as a VM; that VM can load one, many, several types of context processing. The environment (nurture) is what trains/expands the different ones and potentially unplug the other ones, etc.

One of those types of consciousness processing is indistinguishable from what an LLM does.

Everyone knows someone who seems to just call and respond based on whatever popular media of their choice of culture is on about.

I think it's an algorithm, just not a simple transformer pattern matcher that is gigantic and is brute-forcing intelligence.