The connectome is a long way away from replicating the brain. The structure is only the beginning of the story. Even if you're simulating electrical signals through the connectome, what about ion channels, RNA, neuromodulators, etc? The fixation on electrical activity in neuroscience and the wider public understanding is downstream of experimental limitations: we're really good at measuring electricity, but molecular signals in awake, behaving animals remain largely mysterious. It has only been possible to get good direct recordings of dopamine signalling during behaviour, for example, for less than a decade and even then most experiments use a bulk signal averaged across an entire brain region. A fly connectome is substantially less likely to meet the conditions for consciousness than an LLM, which at least has an architecture that appears to be ‘complete’ for producing intelligent behaviour.
the fly connectome everyone is playing with is probably not conscious, but all the experiments with it are kind of horrifying to me anyway, because I don't really see any of this stopping even as these capabilities scale up and conscious systems become more plausible.