Through engineering.

This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Throughout our entire history as a species, we've been building things long, long before we had the tools to understand them. We built bridges and massive cathedrals before we invented geometry. We built and optimized steam engines for a century before we developed the language of fluid dynamics to understand why those designs were optimal.

Engineering very frequently is far ahead of the science needed to explain it.

As far as consciousness goes, personally I think it's an emergent property that will arise on its own when conditions are right. It will take a lot of experimentation to establish the right conditions, and then generations of study to figure out why those conditions were ideal for consciousness to emerge.

Because realistically we can't learn about consciousness with a sample size of one (us). We need to study other consciousnesses to understand the why and hows.

Of course, understanding the mechanism is helpful if you want control, reliability, and precision over the phenomena, but creation can definitely happen before we can explain it.

I look forward to more precise definitions.

What's not clear is what causes it and how to evaluate whether someone/something else "has" it.

Without it we can't walk, eat, reproduce, or do anything. I like to think cost viability reasons explain consciousness. I know people prefer metaphysical or quantum magic explanations, I prefer a prosaic one - cost. It's a mechanism to keep our costs offset by gains. Cost can also explain unity - we die as one organism, not each organ on its own.

Of course, you can be like Daniel Denett and bite the definition bullet - he was talking about 'free-will', not consciounsess and that a chess program has the necessary properties.

But, it makes more sense to take conscious experience as more fundamental, what we are directly aware of, and try to explain everything else with that as the base.

Eg.

1. The brain "does cognition".

Cognition <> consciousness.

2. Some philosophical theories have consciousness pre-figuring complex arrangements like the brain.

ie. The brain is not necessarily a pre-requisite for consciousness.

I'm not saying brains are the only way to produce consciousness, just that the evidence shows that they are the way animals do here on Earth.

It is extremely unlikely that there is something else involved.

> There is certainly much of physics remaining to be discovered, but in the specific regime covering the particles and forces that make up human beings and their environments, we have good reason to think that all of the ingredients and their dynamics are understood to extremely high precision (Carroll 2021a). Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33.pdf

(author is now Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins)

On some views, the brain may be a particularly complex organisation, localisation, or exemplar of consciousness, rather than its ultimate origin. That would include any brains here on earth.

It is extremely unlikely that there is something else involved.

Well, that's clearly a view to be expected of a hardcore physicalist like Carroll but the quoted text seems somewhat circular as it insists on a framework that seems not to really get to grips with the Hard Problem.

This kind of intellectual arrogance and blindness is exactly how people believed that the earth is the center of the universe, and that only human beings have souls. There is nothing new to be learned from their dogmatic opinions.

animals can have offspring without understanding reproduction