I can’t say anything about the spiritualist/materialist thing, but there are two things that are clear:

First: Same as you won’t be able to ever get a Shakespeare work by randomly stringing letters together in any reasonable time frame, you won’t be able to do the same with conciousnes. If it’s possible, the number of incorrect permutations are so massive, that just random trying will not ever be enough in any realistic amount of time.

Second: Transformer networks and all other generative AI concepts we have today aren’t even trying to create a conciousnes. They are not the path to general AI.