alt Hacker News> Consciousness is not produced by the cortex but rather by the brainstem, where signals from all over the body converge (e.g. pain, hunger, itchiness, etc).
Which just begs the question of how pain or hunger is any different from a reward function, the very thing neural networks are based on. Or how it's even different from fungi growing towards food (pleasure), while avoiding salt (pain).
His argument here (that I found most convincing) was children with hydranencephaly. Many of them have very little cortex but still seem to experience a roughly normal range of emotions in appropriate context.