I discuss this and other related thought experiments in “Bomb threats for functionalists”, out at Erkenntnis: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

By chance, the connections may never fire. The brain actually acts just like a normal human brain despite its abnormal counterfactual tendencies. Functionalism denies it consciousness, even though its activities are human-identical.

A system's functional profile depends on the state transitions it is likely to undergo, even if it doesn’t. Take a normal human brain and add a bunch of chancy neural connections. These change state transition probabilities: it isn’t conscious.

Academia seems to encourage people to defend their positions with confidence, but consciousness is such a big, confusing, and controversial topic that at the end of the day none of us should feel all that good about our own positions. I appreciate that this piece tries to expose the nuances.