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I guess I see where your premise is, but the problem is that neuronal activity is not just about communcation but also about processing. It's akin to asking if you gave a computer years worth of data, would it eventually become conscious. I think it wouldn't, and the reason is that you haven't given it a way to process that data into meaningful chunks. If you gave it this paragraph, but you didn't tell it that it had to take every character and convert it to the typeface requested and disaplay it on a rasterized screen, we'd never see it. If our neurons just sent messages across our brain we'd be one huge waste of a telegraph. However, end to end, there are processing units, like the CPU of a computer, which takes this "data" and makes something useful of it. The things we see are truly cell activity in the eye and the neuronal transmission to the "processing centers," where it is converted into something we understand.
Truly, for your metaphor to work.. there'd have to be processing centers listening in on all of those phone calls, parsing the data for relevant data and converting it to relevant "conscious" data.
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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel
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