I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control.

I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.

In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).