Okay, so first of all this isn't an independent consciousness. This is a program. A program now is wrapped with a pretty bow, so on the outside it looks like a nice human, with a politically-correct language.
Any chat programs, search the web and give you a human-like response.
@ZNP tested this out a year ago or something, when he was asking the chat programs on difficult topics and the program gave a politically correct response.
So, what this means that the search engine, searches the web for an answers and it give you a nice package with nice words from the web so it sounds like it has completed 3 masters degrees.
So what this means is that you're asking the internet and the ideas of other people. But instead of googling and reading each site, the program compiles millions of results into a few paragraphs.
As far as consciousness itself goes, that's the biggest mystery of existence.
Some scientists classify consciousness as a "gathering of things". They did an experiment at MIT with independent robots which looked like spiders and the spiders connected with each-other to solve a complex problem.
Animals also have consciousness, even plants, and some other scientists say that the universe itself is conscious.
Now, all of these are nice ideas about this unknown thing called consciousness but none of that matters in relation to intelligence which is why you shouldn't conflate the two even if we had a True AI some day.
Animals have consciousness but they are not intelligent like us to create nuclear technology.
The reason that is, is because we are created in God's image and we have the only known intelligence (so far) in this universe.
I hope this makes sense to you. I've condensed hours of documentaries into that response.
