Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 123 of 171
Consciousness-as-hallucination as the key to intelligence
The project of machine consciousness is to create a computational simulation with such high fidelity to the human brain and human thought (if these are even separate things) that this simulation would also construct subjective experience. In order for AI to be successful in creating a conscious machine, some version of the functionalist and computationalist assumptions must turn out to be correct. However, the degree to which consciousness is necessary for superintelligent computers is an open question. Consciousness-as-hallucination seems to me the key to human-level intelligence.