When someone says that skepticism in human-level AGI probably lies in religious beliefs, it tells me that the person likely believes that they have an idea what

When someone says that skepticism in human-level AGI probably lies in religious beliefs, it tells me that the person likely believes that they have an idea what science and philosophy are saying on the matter. But I strongly suspect that they never actually looked. Among the small but growing number of modern idealists (the philosophy that consciousness precedes matter), a great deal are actually computer scientists who originally set out to work on AGI from a materialistic frame of reference, but bumped into the conscious machine problem. Once they more closely explored what the cognitive fields working to find answers to this problem are saying, they realized that most scientists approaching consciousness as an emergent property of matter will probably never get anywhere with this. Why is "the hard problem of consciousness" inextricable from human-level AGI? Because intelligence is only one component of our mentation. There is a back and forth between processing and experience that make up the whole thing. A machine can have or even exceed human processing power, but it will not experience the simplest of colors. Its approach to "creating" can be random hit-or-misses, or formulaically from existing input. But without subjective experience it cannot be as intently creative as an artist trying to come up with a new genre, or as funny as a comedian that relies on the shared subtleties of feelings and emotions (conscious experience) to make original work that other humans can resonate with. It cannot have the intuition of a gifted chef who suspects that two seldom combined spices might be an unexpected but resounding success in her new dessert.