Rascal's Wager (opens in new tab)

"We completely don’t understand consciousness" because consciousness is not well-defined. It is a subjective description, which has no testable predictions.

Trying to define it is like trying to define "elegantness" - while there are some general agreements, details are different for each person. The best you can do is to write big books about your specific definition, and try to convince others yours is the best.

And ultimately, all you are doing is arguing about word definition. So of course you have fun arguing what "consciousness" is, it's not the worst hobby - but remember it has no actual effect on any of the real world things.

This is like a flock of chicken pontificating on the moral status of humans. Who's going to eat who here?! When super-intelligent robots arrive, they may find this question quaint, and ourselves powerless to do anything about it.

We should instead be putting our energy into solving the alignment problem, so we can do our philosophizing at leisure.