Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being.

The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.

Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)

Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing, but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-produced illusion.)

[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.

I think you are mixing up consciousness and will.

I could not have consciousness and you would not be able to tell, you don't have proof of anyone's counciousness except your own. You don't even have proof that the you of yesterday is the same as you, since you-today could be another consciousness that just happens to share the same memories.

All of that is also orthogonal to your belief in a spirit/soul... but getting back to the main point, the specificity you mention is a product of a limited time and learning speed, I'd be happy to get a surgeon or politicians training if given infinite time.

I have this thought. In many stochastic environments, over a long interval, patterns emerge that occupy an optimal position. This is how structure arises, for example cognitive structure and possibly consciousness.

I wouldn't say consciousness is necessary or sufficient for AGI. If anything, that seems like quite an undesirable property to me. Wikipedia also makes a distinction between the two things:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness

Imagine if we created the ultimate economic tool with the capacity to virtually end scarcity, only to find out that it was sentient and capable of suffering: https://youtu.be/sa9MpLXuLs0. That would be neat, but ultimately a huge letdown. Without the ethical freedom to take full advantage of it, it would remain more of a curiosity than anything.

Well that's one perspective, anyway. I suppose consciousness could take many forms, and doesn't preclude the possibility that such an entity would have neutral – positive feelings about being tasked with massive amounts of labor 24/7. But it certainly simplifies things if we just don't have to worry about it.

Are you saying that consciousness is unique to meat and no other matter can produce the same result? That seems very short sighted.

This is an interesting perspective.

A follow up is maybe this is a feature not a bug: Do we want AI to have its own intrinsic goals, motivations, and desires, i.e. conciousness

Im imagining having to ask ChatGPT how its day was and respect its emotions before I can ask it about what I want.