While we don't understand all parts of consciousness, we understand an incredible amount compared to 25 years ago. So we are much closer today than 25 years ago.

There is a fallacy among non-scientists that if we don't understand absolutely all of it, it means we understand none of it. We understand most of it already.

We don't understand most of it already though. We understand virtually none of it. This is why they're still looking for evidence in support of IIT and global workspace theory as talked about in the article.

Depending on the definition of AGI you are using, you don’t need consciousness for it. I think most do not require it as of now.

Also; ‘it’ will know it has consciousness when it has it, arrogant humans will still deny it.

Humans will have no reason to believe it, and the machine will have no way to prove it. Humans have no other reason to think other humans are conscious except by analogy to themselves.

edit: mainstream science at times has denied that babies, black people, and animals feel pain. Instead, it has suggested that when injured, they behave in a way that causes (white) people to project their own pain onto them; i.e. they anthropomorphize. I mention this to point out that even the analogy to other humans fails when they look a little bit different.

Yeah, so the discussion is useless. It’s not very interesting; our ‘consciousness’ might be a million year old system prompt or it might be something divine. There is no proof either way. For me it’s just a second brain thread that keeps pouring in prompts from the main thread brain and your input hardware.

> We still have no idea what mechanism causes consciousness.

We also have no way to detect it or to prove that it exists, other than direct experience. Consciousness doesn't affect the world in any way that we know of. I think that the most reasonable position is that if we could somehow extract the consciousnesses of two different people and switch them with each other, that neither the subjects nor the observers would notice a difference.

Unless we're dualists (which is totally valid), there's little reason to think that intelligence and consciousness (depending on how it's being defined) have much of a relationship at all.

That is one position, but here's the thing though - how does something like "F = ma" enter into your mind in the first place? It first has to enter your consciousness right? And then maybe you might need to make a focused effort of grappling with it to understand what the symbols and implications of that equation mean before you sort of internalize it?

Maybe one line of inquiry that might be able to give us some clues is if we're able to actually have people learn something like a physics equation with no prior knowledge of it while they aren't conscious of the learning of it. That might be a hard study to do with possible ethical concerns but if there's a way to design it, I could see some hope for getting closer to understanding the role/structure of consciousness.

One maybe plausible explanation might be that there's some sort of hierarchy of pattern matching there, where first you need to understand language, then mathematical language, then finally the physics equations. If you take that view, then the equations are really just extremely sophisticated pattern matching constructs. They don't have to actually _be_ the code that makes the universe-computer run so to speak, they just need to give us a precise enough predictive model that we're able to do useful things with it.

Maybe another way to put it is, we're not actually uncovering the source code of the universe, we're just looking at the functioning of the universe and extrapolating our own patterns that yield the greatest predictive power. On that view at least there are some plausble avenues for explaining strange artifacts like the time-reversibility of some equations - i.e. our patterns show that this will give predictions even if time flowed backwards, but the universe's time doesn't flow backwards because this pattern that we found is not the same thing as the actual universe. In that sense we'll never be able to actually uncover this source code so to speak, but that is just how science works - we're always looking for a more accurate theory - we'll never reach "the final theory", and even if we did, how would we know?

It's almost starting to look like the way to make progress is not to stick electrodes into biological systems and measure a few dozen neurons to try and reverse engineer biological consciousness.

Might actually be easier to create artificial consciousness such that we can actually measure and more closely study what is happening.

The biological approach is fiendishly difficult. If we can barely understand how an LLVM is working, what chance do we have of trying to understand one by only looking at the raw electrical output few dozen transistors from a machine running one.

Consciousness and AGI are completely orthogonal concepts. You can have either one without the other.