Consciousness is a very interesting epiphenomenon. It piques intellectual interest across the board, from first year psychology students, to Nobel Laureates like Francis Crick [1]. I still cringe whenever I remember the time I boldly announced to my would-be undergrad thesis advisor "I want to study the origins of consciousness!" Thankfully she was wonderful advisor with a knack for cultivating more practical research interests, and within weeks I was decapitating rats in the name of science.
I've been studying biological neural networks (bNN) for about ten to fifteen years, and artificial neural networks (aNN) for the past four or five (aNN were something I first learned about in Kutner circa 2005[2], oblivious to their future utility in machine learning). It's been interesting to observe how fast the field of machine learning has progressed aNN theory and application. IMO it has basically caught up to neurobiology - not so much as a body of knowledge but in the elucidation of the key components that allow NN to acquire and retrieve information (the modulation of synaptic weights, and efficient functions to update these weights). Machines are now smarter than ever, and have the capacity for adaptive behavior. A triumphant feat, no doubt.
But within all that progress, we still have no fucking clue what consciousness is about. We don't have a roadmap to get there. We don't know where it resides in the brain (somewhere distributed among cortex presumably). And we don't have a solid strategy for ML attempts at AI consciousness. The best we can offer is: "just keep building these things more powerful and more parallel and maybe it will eventually pop out". Who knows, maybe it will. But it probably doesn't work like that. For all we know consciousness may be a dirty trick, or nothing at all. Sure, we can think about thinking; it's a handy tool developed by billions of eukaryotic cells working together, to keep themselves alive (or at least to proliferate their shared dna).
I think you might enjoy "In Search of Memory" by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel (pdf linked below). He provides an entertaining and informative narrative documenting the history of neuroscience (a history Kandel himself heavily influenced). Kandel also wrote 'Principles of Neural Science', a 1400 page tome that some regard as the neuroscience bible. If you are more interested in the latest happenings, run a google scholar search for articles by Huganir, R.Nicoll, or R.Malinow (Malinow had an interesting paper recently called 'Engineering a Memory'). Or if you are interested in neuro methods look up whats been done in the Karl Deisseroth lab.
It's not a matter of metaphysical, it's just that we hardly can define consciousness or measure it. We feel like it's in our brain, but as long as we don't have an objective way of proving it so, it remains an assumption. There is nothing wrong with it as long as we acknowledge it. If we don't, this kind of thinking always slow down further discovery.
I've been studying biological neural networks (bNN) for about ten to fifteen years, and artificial neural networks (aNN) for the past four or five (aNN were something I first learned about in Kutner circa 2005[2], oblivious to their future utility in machine learning). It's been interesting to observe how fast the field of machine learning has progressed aNN theory and application. IMO it has basically caught up to neurobiology - not so much as a body of knowledge but in the elucidation of the key components that allow NN to acquire and retrieve information (the modulation of synaptic weights, and efficient functions to update these weights). Machines are now smarter than ever, and have the capacity for adaptive behavior. A triumphant feat, no doubt.
But within all that progress, we still have no fucking clue what consciousness is about. We don't have a roadmap to get there. We don't know where it resides in the brain (somewhere distributed among cortex presumably). And we don't have a solid strategy for ML attempts at AI consciousness. The best we can offer is: "just keep building these things more powerful and more parallel and maybe it will eventually pop out". Who knows, maybe it will. But it probably doesn't work like that. For all we know consciousness may be a dirty trick, or nothing at all. Sure, we can think about thinking; it's a handy tool developed by billions of eukaryotic cells working together, to keep themselves alive (or at least to proliferate their shared dna).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis 2. https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/rkulik/mat3378/mat3378-tex...