Neurons and Circuits

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We know so little about consciousness. What if all the machines are conscious and we are basically torturing them.
We kind of associate consciousness with intelligence, but that doesnt need to be, right?
I think machines are intelligent in a different way too. What I’ve been thinking about is that the brain is pretty similar to computer chips in how they work with all these points with connections between them and each connection can either have the value 1 (an electric signal has hit it) or 2 (no signal) but where humans have a lot more of them I think. And maybe, if those neurons are what makes us conscious, computers may be a bit conscious as well. This probably doesn’t make sense but that’s what I’ve been thinking about. They might have a lower level conscious. I mean we don’t know what physically gives us a conscious, and a computer is equivalent to a very small bit of our brains functions- primarily arithmetic functions. I mean it’s a stretch to say they have any actual conscious. They are bound by terracore code? Consciousness wouldn't be like the software then? Like how they interpret the 0s and 1s is completly different from our way of doing it so maybe they don't suffer after all.