The explanation that consciousness is an illusion.

You miss the point: We do not know how to simulate neurons that can replace the real thing.

Thanks! And that is a good example.

Not at all. You would still be several orders of magnitude from the precision needed to understand what is going on. If there is a level where that is actually possible. For a modern computer, even if you have detailed high-speed observations of every transistor (vastly simpler than a neuron and digital in addition), you would probably still need in excess of a thousand years to understand what is going on from that.

No, AI is not advancing rapidly. In fact it has massively slowed down and it is getting progressively slower. What you are talking about is called "automation". The problem is that most people are not very smart and can be replaced (within limits) by something that is not intelligent at all, especially when that something can be replicated very cheaply, like software.

The thing is that the "illusion" explanation is completely bogus. Even neuro-science is not claiming that. What they claim is that "free will" is an illusion, but they are doing so without good evidence and likely with serious misinterpretation of the data they have. (And good CS researcher can come up with several alternate explanations for what they are seeing. These people are not engineers and barely qualify as scientists. They have real trouble modeling information processing and they jump to conclusions that are simplistic and not supported by the evidence.)

Consciousness is completely unexplained at this time and it is the elephant in the room for all neuro-science.

No. Really not. Stop spreading lies about the state of Science. We have simulated how some people think neurons may work.

Excellent summary.

Incidentally, to expert audiences IBM is not marketing Watson as "AI" at all. I have been an experts-only events on that. They only roll out the "AI" terminology to people that have no clue that feeding data into an expert system is a huge amount of work and that Watson makes that a lot easier by having some rudimentary skills to handle somewhat formalized written language as is found in scientific papers.

Well said. The thing is that "human intelligence" is usually not very good. It is just the best thing available by an extremely large margin.

Indeed. This is Eliza on steroids and interesting scientifically. It has nothing to do with intelligence or cognition though. It is about making machines more interactive in ways accessible to non-experts. The machines remain machines.

No, you do not know anything of that sort. You do know that there is observable activity in certain regions of the brain when people do certain things. That is completely different and you claim means you do not understand your chosen field. You are basically claiming to know that the web-browser is creating the WWW, when it merely is an interface to it. At the current level of scientific understanding it is not possible to make the determination how much the brain is an interface and how much it is actually doing stuff itself. You just blatantly claim, with out any scientific evidence, that the brain does it all. There are rather strong indications that this is not true, but there is no proof either way.

Stop misrepresenting Science. As a holder of a PhD from one of the best technical Universities on the planet and still somewhat active scientist, this offends me.

He is suffering from fundamentalist physicalism, a common thing among US atheists. They do away with God and then throw out all other things going vaguely in that direction, when there is zero need to. Hence these people fall for exactly the thing they think they are opposing: The use physical reality as their only true god and deny that anything besides it can exist. They claim Science tells us so, when it does no such thing.

As an atheist and a dualist, I have zero problems with the concept of a "soul" or similar non-physical part of any sentient being. I just find the idea of a "God" to be a rather infantile human construct not supported by any observable fact. And the reasons for assuming the existence of such a thing as a "soul" are not "pre-scientific" at all. They are all still valid, and some are stronger than ever: Consciousness (and with it the personal experience of existence) is completely unexplained. Intelligence is completely unexplained, despite long-term intensive research into it in several fields. Yet both clearly exist and both are observable only together. These are strong scientific facts that point out to anybody able to listen that the current models of reality are rather incomplete.

Of course, fundamentalist physicalist fall for a very religious thing here: They assume their base conviction is fundamental truth (without any scientific basis for that assumption) and can then derive from that a number of things that support their base conviction. That approach is called "delusion", not "Science".

On the scientific side, Intelligence is an "interface observation", and so is everything known about consciousness. It does not tell us what creates this interface behavior and what is in the box or whether this is actually happening in the box at all. Only if you mistakenly assume Science tells us that everything is Physics can you assume intelligence and consciousness are created by matter. But if you start with an unproven assumption taken as absolute truth, you have already failed and are not a scientist. If you do that then you are no better that some random preacher.

And there you fail. Is consciousness also a primitive, superstitious concept? Because Physics gives us absolutely nothing on it.

You are just a fundamentalist physicalist, which is a quasi-religion. As all religious fundamentalists, you cannot actually grasp available evidence wherever it does collide with your fundamentalist beliefs. And hence your inane "explanations" (which really explain nothing) result.

There is also consciousness whis is apparently intricately linked with intelligence. From Physics, there is rather strong indication that consciousness is not part of the physical universe. There is just no mechanism for it. At all. With intelligence, it gets more murky, but half a century of failed AI research seems to indicate that matter and energy as known are actually not suitable to implement intelligence. The only known computing mechanisms that could approach some of the things that (smart) human intelligence can do do not scale to what humans can do in this universe.

We do not even know whether it is doing that. Just that most people are capable of doing it to some degree. That is different.