[snickerbockers]

No, that's not my point. The reason we have consciousness is not that we don't understand how our bodies work. We have consciousness and we don't know why because we don't understand how our bodies work.

Consciousness is directly observable to everybody who is conscious. From there the next logical step is to find out why people are conscious, and right now that's not something that anybody understands. There is presumably something that causes consciousness even though we can only observe the result.

However, saying that a machine is conscious would be to assume your own conclusion. Nobody's observed a machine being conscious. There's no explanation for how a machine would be conscious and there never will be because we already know everything about how they work.

[int_19h]

Consciousness of oneself is directly observable to everybody who is consciousness. But generalizing it to others is a leap of faith. Some people can only extend it to some other humans, others to all humans, yet others include certain animals. I don't see why it'd be unreasonable to extend it also to AI.