What If Consciousness Comes First?
The real answer is that we don&#x27;t yet know enough about how the brain works to work effectively on this problem. We don&#x27;t know what questions to ask or how to break down the problem into smaller problems.<p>We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago, when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from &quot;What the Frog&#x27;s Eye Tells the Frog&#x27;s Brain&quot; (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There&#x27;s been real progress.<p>(I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. &quot;Does a rock have intentions?&quot; was an exam question. The &quot;AI winter&quot; followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their &quot;shut up and calculate&quot; approach started working.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hearingbrain.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;letvin_ieee_1959.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hearingbrain.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;letvin_ieee_1959.pdf</a>