You should read "Gödel, Escher, Bach". It's an incredibly enjoyable, though quite dense, exploration of how possibly can intelligence arise from non-intelligent things.
...and of how that intelligence/consciousness/whatever would exist on a level "above" the machine, so to speak. And that's where the confusion and arguments usually pop up: it's not that the machine (or slab of meat) is self-aware as much as there is a self-awareness running on the machine, and there's a reasonable chance that the consciousness is not understandable, even in principle, from an examination of the parts that enable it (whether physical or process).