Quantum consciousness...

[I_am_not_mafia]

Either way, there is no reason to pre-suppose that we cannot build artificial conscious agents.

I agree.  But the question is-- how would you know if you did?  You could operationalize consciousness in purely objective terms, but that begs the question because it is the subjectivity which makes mind interesting.

Well we'd be building conscious robots for a reason. We'd therefore be judging the robots that we build on whether they perform the functionality that we want of them. Whether someone wants to call them conscious or not would come afterwards, and not be particularly relevant unless we were concerned with AI-rights.