True, genetic algorithms are definitely a step in the right direction. There is the one famous example of the filter circuit where even the designers of the software couldn't figure out how the damn thing worked, but work it did. Parts connected in the weirdest ways and if you took them out the circuit stopped to function. Apparently the genetic algorithm had in its feeback loop discovered some none-trivial parasitic effects of some components. No sane designer would have done it that way, but that's beside the point because the filter had less parts than any designed by humans directly.
I'm very strongly a believer in the material consciousness,
The emperors new mind was an interesting read but I found it to be a tremendous buildup to an almost magical reliance on quantum mechanics to provide us with our consciousness.
I don't have much with magic so I'll stick with regular physics and chemistry until it has been proven otherwise.
There are too many brain-computer analogies to avoid the strong suggestion that the brain computes. It doesn't do it in a way that we can hook up a debugger to just yet but it does seem to have a lot in common. It's more of an architecture/interface problem.
But strong AI probably won't come from being able to interface with the brain or from a sudden leap of insight in how it all works. I think strong AI will follow from a seed AI which in turn will follow from some relatively simple breakthrough or insight that we still haven't gotten around to.
The simulation of the cortex of simple mammals is another such step in between, do you have a reference for that ?