[nox101]

I replicate things I don't understand all the time. I replicate bread. I haven't a clue why it turns into bread. I just follow the instructions and it becomes bread.

We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consciousness part.

[jugg1es]

I think there might be more to consciousness than just simulating the physical components of the brain that we currently understand. There are theories that neurons or clusters of neurons are leveraging quantum superposition in order to function. If that turns out to be true, then a simulation of the physical parts won't be enough for AGI. It would also mean that we actually do need to gain a better understanding of how the brain works in order to achieve AGI. I am skeptical that we can achieve AGI with software alone.

[gls2ro]

If you think about the bread example, what you do is to follow a very well known recipe even if you don't understand yeast.

In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread

To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tasted a thing called bread. We are not even sure we all tasted the same thing, nor can we agree on how to describe it, except we call it the same "bread." we don't have any recipe for it or know its ingredients. To make this even stranger we are not even sure bread is something that we are supposed to eat or it is something that we wear. Maybe it was some kind of cloth that as a strange experiment it was given for us to taste.

And now we are trying to create it. It could be that taking enough time and energy and people that are trying to create this thing called bread, we might, in the end, arrive at something that, when tasted by everyone, we can agree it is bread, but that seems less probable until we agree on a description of it.

[nox101]

I would make the analogy to gunpower. We knew how to make gunpower from raw ingredients for nearly 3000 years before we knew how and why those ingredients actually caused the reaction they do.

I expect it may be the same for consciousness. We'll put the ingredients together (either simulate all the atoms of a brain, or all the molecules, or all the cells, or something higher level) and we'll get consciousness in the simulation.

Like gunpower, we won't know why these ingredients produce consciousness but we'll know they do and maybe later we'll figure out why.