Inventing Consciousness

TL;DR: We can propose “consciousness tests” only if we imply the existence of a task that only a genuinely conscious system can solve. Therefore, if we invent an internally uncontradictive solution to that task, we’ll create consciousness.I won’t waste my – and yours – time arguing for the importance of consciousness research. You already know it. Everything we know is known through the lens of conscious experience. Nor will I dwell on the familiar difficulties: the hard problem, the explanatory gap, the proliferation of theories, or the fact that comparisons between the most promising two has not shown a clear winner.Instead, I’m here to share something that gives me hope. But first, a simple map of the labyrinth, with its dead ends and unexplored passages.What do we do when we try to understand what consciousness is?The first instinct is to take something conscious, take something unconscious, and compare them. This approach, which I call the comparative approach, has appeared in many forms since it was first proposed. Examples include comparisons between:wakefulness and anesthesia, coma, or deep sleep;perceived and unperceived stimuli, as in binocular rivalry or inattentional blindness;animals that pass consciousness tests and those that do not;intact and damaged brains, including lesions, surgical interventions, and neurodegeneration;developmental stages before and after the presumed emergence of consciousness, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.The underlying logic is:System A is conscious and possesses property α.System B is unconscious and lacks property α.Therefore consciousness depends on α.This approach is incredibly productive in identifying the possible neural correlates of consciousness, but it is simultaneously an important limitation. Even if α is a perfect correlate, it does not explain why consciousness exists or what causal role it plays.At first glance, the limitation may seem easy to overcome (neurobiologists are especially prone to simpli