@whatthefluther; so sorry, left it open and went to watch a movie :)
@The_Compassionate_Heretic; why do you think that? I agree that we will never be able to engineer consciousness, but only because I don’t think that anything worthy of the name exists; I don’t think that there is anything special about our own brains, either. In fact, that lack of distinction is what I find to be so wonderful and fascinating about them, that they can take such basic, unremarkable parts and from them create such a marvelous whole; I consider this much more interesting than just saying that we have a “consciousness” and a “soul”, and leaving it at that.
One thing that our brains can never accomplish is to understand themselves. Their behavior is emergent, which is to say that, while the components are simple, they combine in such a way that the only way to discover the outcome of the combination is to track them step by step. In the end, an extremely complex behavior is reached, and there is no way to look at the broad plan, the overarching pattern that created it, because there is no such pattern, only a string of successive events. Accordingly, to understand how a brain accomplished a task would require holding each successive, complete state of that brain in one’s own brain, an impossible task. This is why it is so tempting to believe that the brain cannot be the sum of its parts, as one can never have an understanding of how those parts of the brain combine to form the mind. It also makes it impossible to design a brain from scratch, because one cannot create the building blocks of an emergent system with a particular end behavior in mind. In our case, they can only have been created by a process of trial and error, as with evolution or a creator with a lot of spare time. In theory, however there is no fundamental barrier preventing the creation on something that approximates our brains; and there is nothing to make an approximation necessarily less “conscious”.