Consciousness is a tricky concept, hard to pin down even after centuries of debate. It's not very useful for understanding how minds work. Search might be a be

Consciousness is a tricky concept, hard to pin down even after centuries of debate. It's not very useful for understanding how minds work. Search might be a better idea to focus on. It's about looking through possibilities, which we can study scientifically. Search is more about the process, while consciousness is vague. Search has a clear goal and space to look in, but we can't even agree on what consciousness is for. Search happens everywhere, at all scales. It's behind protein folding, evolution, human thinking, cultural change, and AI. Search has some key features: it is compositional, it's discrete, recursive, it's social, and it uses language. Search needs to copy information, but also change it to explore new directions. Yes, I count DNA as a language, code and math too. Optimizing models is also search. We can stick with the flawed idea of consciousness, or we can try something new. Search is more specific than consciousness in some ways, but also more general because it applies to so many things. It doesn't have the same problems as consciousness (like being subjective), and we can study it more easily. If we think about it, search explains how we got here. It helps cross the explanatory gap.