We can all agree Kurzweil is past his intellectual expiration date. The saddest part here is he wasted such a good title, "How to Create a Mind," repeating his historical non-usable drivel (not to mention it sounds like a Culture series book).

My current "create a consciousness" track is to get something with pattern completion completion working (NB: aspie nerds often fail this step interpersonally ("Oh, Hello!" "blank stare"), but not intellectually/professionally ("What does this thingamajigger do?" "Oh, well, that's there because historically we used a 3.2 bit kernel to operate the Arm of God and... [30 minutes later]... Why are you falling asleep?").

The thing inside your head stringing your actions together into a coherent after-the-fact story isn't pattern recognition or even pattern completion, but pattern completion completion. You have to take the context of the new world generated by your prior pattern completion and run a new internal world simulation based on that, then take action. This does leave out intrinsic or emotional motivations pulling you hither or thither, but that's a vague writeup for another time. Though, there are plenty of smart people running around in the world with seemingly no emotions. Emotional feeling doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for consciousness (or for being usable to be exploited by employers to make them 10x-1000x richer while you get 0.5x richer).

It's fun to think about at least.