It seems that conciousness is just eventual function of any adaptive system that's complex and poweful enough.
Research mentiones that organisms as diverse as birds, mammals and mollusks advanced enough show some consciuosness. Mollusks are so different from us that they have evolved their own eyes from scratch, completely different from ours apart from functional elements.
Is a city containing a million humans conscious? If not, what is the criteria which rules out that city is not adaptive or complex and powerful enough?
Human to human link is too narrow for the whole city to be conscious. Same way ant colony is not conscious. I have no idea what is the threshold but my guess is that conciousness requires more connectivity by at least few orders of magnitude higher that any city can provide. Also there is a factor of time. For being that lives and observes human brain for 1 ns it's not concious mind. It's just elaborate bit of architecture.
Research mentiones that organisms as diverse as birds, mammals and mollusks advanced enough show some consciuosness. Mollusks are so different from us that they have evolved their own eyes from scratch, completely different from ours apart from functional elements.