What If the Brain Doesn't Produce Consciousness?

I saw this article about how a startup called Flourish is building an AI model based on the human brain. This is how they describe their goal: “We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.”

This, it seems to me, shows a very wrong understanding of what the brain is—like it’s some engine of consciousness where thinking is generated, and if we can only design an artificial model based the exact measurements of the brain, then the secrets of consciousness will be unlocked. The word for this in philosophy of science is reductionism: that all spirit and consciousness can be reduced to the materiality of the brain—that there is no real spirit or consciousness separate from the materiality of the brain, it’s all just generated by the brain, and what you experience as spirit or consciousness has no existence beyond the material basis that generates it. It’s all just an illusion pumped out by the brain.

William James proposed an alternative to this reductive materialism over a century ago: a theory of the brain as a transmission point for essential reality coming from some other dimension to channel itself through. The brain is a receptor for the essential reality of the universe. This is what consciousness is—the essential reality of the universe, being tuned into by the brain. The brain is special because it is a point through which this essential reality of the universe—consciousness—pours in.

It seems to me that this transmitter theory of the brain makes a lot more sense than the reductionist material model—that everything is just generated by the brain and has a purely material basis and existence. Even if the transmitter theory presupposes a larger world of spirit and consciousness, as the essential reality of the universe—that seems less absurd than all of it just springing from the brains contained inside our heads.

So would creating an artificial brain—done perfectly down to the last tiny detail—be able to harness the essential reality of the universe? Would the essential reality of the universe open itself up to an artificial transmitter? That is one of the main philosophical questions of our time.