Another useless article about &quot;consciousness&quot;.<p><i>&quot;We  share  a  conviction  that  no  philosopher  or 
scientist  living  today  has  the  foggiest  notion  of 
how consciousness, and its inseparable companion 
free will, emerge, as they surely do, from a material 
brain.&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s reasonable enough.  Nobody seems to have a clue about how &quot;consciousness&quot;, whatever it is, really works.  If someone did, it would have been implemented in a computer by now.<p><i>&quot;We mysterians are persuaded that no computer of  the  sort  we  know  how  to  build—that  is,  one made with wires and switches—will ever cross a threshold to become aware of what it is doing.&quot;</i><p>Nah. Now he&#x27;s just mouthing off.  There&#x27;s a long history of this sort of thing from philosophers.  Aristotle claimed humans were special because they could do arithmetic.  Now we know that arithmetic is simple, in the sense that it takes a very small parts count. Hubert Dreyfus, in 1972, said computers couldn&#x27;t play even a decent amateur game of chess.  Now, any laptop PC can trounce grand masters.<p>What AI isn&#x27;t doing well yet is predicting the consequences of actions: &quot;what will happen next&quot;, and &quot;what will happen next if this decision is made&quot;. Basically, the technology to get through the next 15 seconds of life. This is the beginning of common sense, and really ought to be worked on more.  We have the tools now to go at that problem. Self-driving cars have to do some of this, and answers may come out of that technology.  This is an essential technology for robots which operate in an unstructured world.<p>Once that problem has been solved, we might be in a position to talk about &quot;consciousness&quot; from a non-clueless perspective.  Higher level thinking is mostly a strategy module for the &quot;next 15 seconds&quot; control system.<p>At least the article doesn&#x27;t use the world &quot;quantum&quot;.