&gt; And yet we&#x27;re conscious of something.<p>The problem with saying things like that is that no one actually defines what consciousness is any objectively verifiable terms.<p>&gt; However hard it may be to define, and however partial it may be, there&#x27;s still something that makes it clear that I am I: cogito ergo sum; je pense donc je suis; I think therefore I am. I don&#x27;t want to say that we&#x27;ll never get there with computers, but so far, we don&#x27;t even have the slightest idea how to make that happen.<p>No, that misses the real issue: the real issue is that we have no idea what that even <i>means</i>. We have an internal subjective experience that we describe as consciousness, and we assume other people do, too, because they look like us and act like us and it just makes it simpler to assume that underneath they are like us. But we don&#x27;t have any way of determining that a thing is or is not conscious -- so not only do we have no knowledge of how to make something conscious, we have no knowledge of whether something is conscious, and no framework to <i>develop</i> knowledge about that, because we <i>don&#x27;t know what &quot;conscious&quot; means</i>, outside of our own internal personal experience.