So, I don't really know what I am saying, really.
To me its like asking 'can we build a lightbulb' by looking at a picture ... but without knowing what electricity is. Sure, you can construct the vacuum chamber and the magnesium(?) filament, but if you have no concept of how the lightbulb actually makes light, its going to be real unlikely that it'll light up when you're 'done'.
Could we make all the biological equivalent structures... lets assume yes. But if we don't know the source of consciousness, it seems rather unlikely that it'll just happen spontaneously once we're done building the box.
Right, I mean, in the rest of the quoted post, I asked "But, "Soul" aside, without knowing what consciousness actually is, the issue of conveyance would seem to be missing the fundamental point, though, right?"
So, I mean, I am biased, because someone who is educated in psychology and generally seeing things through a lens of something like psychodynamic forces, I have doubts about all the looking done at making AI we could ever really fear, or consider Intelligence, when we don't even know what "intelligence" even is, let along how it is formulated.
And simply attempting to "vivisect" the brain, via things like neuroscience is likely to miss the "big picture" of the totality of the system, which might well be what consciousness actually is...