I wonder if worms have consciousness, and if they just replicated that? I'm curious as to what will happen once it scales up to human brains... Also of note: The game creatures has something similar. It's an artificial life game, where the creatures have fully functional bodies. Everything from brains (memories, emotions, vision processing, etc) to stomachs and limbs, etc. The creatures could breed and produce offspring. And they'd learn. You could teach them words and what different objects were. And eventually you could teach them basic sentences and how to survive. It's a really cool series. Creatures wiki page As for the worm, I'm really curious as to where this will lead. Do you think virtual/code organisms will have the same emergent consciousness and thought that 'real' organisms do? So many questions.