You don't appear to have studied any philosophy of mind. The idiot was belittle because what he says is ludicrous. Intelligence presupposes ability to learn from small samples, to adapt, to transfer knowledge by analogy, to handle exceptions that have never been seen, to generalize, and many others. None of which any type of NN large or small has in the least.

NN are most fefinitely not intelligence for any sensible and commonly accepted definition of the term.

And, while we may not know exactly what consciousness is, we know enough about what it is not. And it is not what you say nor it happens inside any ddep learning algorithm. Most probably consciousness is not a computational process of those we can compute with the type of computing architectures we have. It is not a matter of quantity.

A longer ladder is not what is needed to reach the moon.