Now hold on a second. You seem very certain of "individual", what it is, and what it is not. I am not so sure that we're not actually creating an individual here or at least parts of an individual as snapshots of qualia and being able to recall or "hallucinate" them. Does no amount of mimicry bring a program closer to an individual? What if we made a really clever model that learns on the fly via constant streams of qualia and adapts as best as it can and it could do all of the things you could do, maybe not very well, or only to the same level as a service animal; is that any closer to an individual? I believe it is way more of a spectrum than the binary "will never be an individual".

Regardless of the details of how a brain is a conscious, it can be reduced to its constituent pieces or nuts and bolts, so to speak. Everything from the electrochemical potentials within neurons to the encoded chemical information in the form of DNA and RNA that spontaneously replicates and orchestrates a maddening array of complexities, we can partially explain. Even if our explanation is basically parts in a bucket, that's enough to paint a future where humanity understands enough of those processes to replicate consciousness without actually understanding why it works. Perhaps we don't need to understand the emergent properties, but merely discover them like the standard model in physics. We equally can't explain /why/ the fundamental physics constants are the way they are, but we can use them to do extraordinary things.