[aehetherhear]

Agree, but I don't think biological neurons are the crux of the issue. I can't find the quote, but I believe from the book Echopraxia, the author discusses consciousness as a form of conflict resolution in regards to predictions about the self, an example of holding a hot pan despite the pain, knowing the consequence of letting go results in hunger. Or similar, the classic Jabberwocky example from Dune as a test of Paul's "humanity". But we can easily imitate these processes with machine learning even today, several projects involving the OpenAI gym have approached this. At what point do we believe these agents are conscious, and at what point do we shut them down?

[skosch]

This builds on the theory of "predictive processing". There are a few key people in the field; Karl Friston, Andy Clark, a few others – lots of rabbit holes to go down.