What exactly started happening spontaneously? If I get the article- they netoworked a bucket of cpu’s- where each microprocessor stood in for a neuron and then put power into the net. And something happened which was characterized as spontaneous. What happened?

Not speech or word formation, I know. But did the chips do something they weren’t programmed to do? And if so- was it something that couldn’t be characterized as emergent (as defined by Kevin Kelley in “Wired”) ? It’s not necessarily that interesting or revealing how “surprised” some observer was- that may may (usually will) say more about the observer than the observed. Unless, of course, the result is shocking in general.

I don’t know what a virtual mouse would experience- but then I don’t know what an actual mouse experiences.

If accurate, I would theorize a virtual human brain would experience what the human brain experiences. Which I suspect isn’t much without eyes, ears, and the rest of the nerve cells that sense and feed the brain. Certainly not self awareness or distinction.