It's physical matter all the way down.

With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.

There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.

Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.

If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?