With regards to what consciousness is, Peter Watts opened an interesting rabbit hole that I have yet to dive into. His discussion about his own real-world inqui

With regards to what consciousness is, Peter Watts opened an interesting rabbit hole that I have yet to dive into. His discussion about his own real-world inquiries into consciousness is appended at the end of his fiction work "Blindsight" [1]. Search for the heading "Sentience/Intelligence", and read the first couple paragraphs there. Watts suspects from his readings that sentience makes up the majority of our day-to-day physical and sensorium activities and sapience (consciousness) is a very thin self-aware layer on top of that. If his sources that he's reading are correct, then we can go a long way implementing practical and profitable applications with "just" ML, but with less focus on trying to reach AGI. There are more radical suggestions within the decidedly philosophical side of the cognitive science community that seem to wonder if consciousness isn't simply a very sophisticated, highly complex ML'ish pattern-matching illusion, and we're all reductively representable as deterministic entities somehow. All this postulating is too far away from the testable engineering/tinkering/science'ing I prefer to inform myself about, so I'm not quite sure what to make of it, other than to observe that ML hasn't made much of a dent in the sentience side, as we're nowhere near a general-purpose robot that cleans floors, does the laundry, and simultaneously avoids squishing the house cat, none of which requires sapience. [1] http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm