If a billion people each acted as one neuron, would the resulting mind be conscious?

Philosopher Ned Block imagined replacing every neuron in a brain with a person holding a phone, each one calling the people standing in for its neighboring neurons and passing along the same electrical-style signals. The network could behave exactly like a mind having an experience. Block used it to argue that merely getting the functional organization right can't be enough for real consciousness to be there.

— Ned Block, Troubles with Functionalism — Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1978