Does that figure include amortized R&D, software development, and support costs? If not, the $500 price point is illusory.

Take your pick.

Would someone, please, think of the children?!

designed a chip with 41 vertical layers of semiconductors and insulating materials

I love, that it is a prime number!

"a decision and action appear to takes place milliseconds before the conscious mind is aware of it, but phenomenologically it feels like you made that decision before the event happened."

I certainly don't know, and I don't think the research answers that question yet.

But from what I've read its research that raises many more questions than it REALLY answers.

For example, what if the consciousness feedback loop is not "aware" of the decisions (its "output") until they've been dumped to memory and looped around and come back in as "inputs".

So that doesn't necessarily mean you don't consciously make decisions, it just means you aren't yourself aware you made it until after you made it.

In web programming terms, suppose "consciousness" is the local application state view, which is a reflection of the data on the server "memory" and has all your data labels and field contents showing (including the logs of its decisions). Imagine too that a "decision" is like activating a call to the server to make a an update to the back-end database.

So based on the data in the local state, and the running software, the local app "decides" to calls the server and make an update. Lets just say, it just does it -- in particular it doesn't feed that information back to the local state object, no UI is updated, no labels are changed. Yet.

The local state is not updated with even the record that it made the call until it gets the state update from the server a few milliseconds later.

Then, if you are a brain researcher monitoring the application state (aka consciousness), you'll discover it doesn't "know" it called the server, until after the server has been called and returned.

The point is: just because we don't know what we decided right away doesn't necessarily imply that we didn't decide. The brain is an organic system that evolved over millions of years, perhaps having consciousness run a few milliseconds behind is perfectly serviceable solution for the problems it evolved to solve.

Perhaps its even advantageous, waiting for the awareness of the decision to propagate through consciousness before emitting the decision to the rest of the body might cause enough action latency that we're polar bear or sabre tooth tiger food. Better to get the body acting act as soon as the information is there -- there's simply no survival advantage to waiting for it to get dumped back to memory and updated in the consciousness first.

Or maybe consciousness is an illusion, so we can watch a show that aleady happened with no impact on the world around us... but that seems relatively useless in a world with polar bears and sabre tooth tigers.

Yeah, you could say that. On the other hand you could say the rewrite was an investment in maintainability--sacrificing immediate stability for a future of lack of memory issues and reduced possibility of control flow mistakes or type errors.

I'm afraid I insist. To give the main argument, we have not yet found an effect that does not follow physical causes. Speech about consciousness is caused by the physical universe--particles, electrical states, etc. Some intuition pumps are: a rule-based chatbot that doesn't pass the Turing test could discuss consciousness. If the concept is even coherent, a zombie would discuss its consciousness exactly as you and I are, despite having none. If someone sleep-talked or spoke while under the influence, they could utter low quality statements about consciousness while their consciousness was somewhere else, in effect doing the same thing a zombie would. "Lying" is a concept that depends on consciousness, but there are any number of ways a system can discuss consciousness in a way that does not agree with the actual fact. In particular we never discuss the current consciousness. Meditation (mostly noting) leads one to believe that ironically, people don't seem to "experience" most of their experience--one assumes it's because bleeding edge conscious experience is typically not stored, even in working memory.

2. I like the way you think, but I don't agree with your argument about consciousness manipulating reality. That's supposition, and if another being said its consciousness influenced its actions, you would have to take its word for it. That is no evidence. But if consciousness did not exert influence, conscious valence would not coincide so well with evolutionary needs (calories, sex). So consciousness that exerts influence in the direction of evolutionary fitness it selected for. I.e., the physical correlates are selected for, but it comes to the same thing. (At least this is my most recent thinking on the issue

Okay, but why is there something that it's like to be organized energy? Why does energy experience pleasure? Such a weird phenomenon deserves explanation.

I take it you think the concept of a zombie is incoherent--but I would ask why all that computation has an experience?

Alternatively, does every computation have qualia? If so, that may simplify the conversation but I don't think it resolves it.

You can't possibly think I'd reply to that tone? You're not entitled to my time.

Let me clarify. I mean consciousness as experience. Not thinking, not feeling, not memories, but the raw experience that is always happening here and now. When you used the word "perceive" I interpreted that as a tacit admission that experience does exist. It's the same for any quale: warmth, cold, anxiety, fear, desire. You can argue that they represent facets of computation but you would not deny that you feel them. They are real for you. Why is that? Is 4 real for a calculator like friction on my skin is real to me? Thomas Nagel asked, "What's it like to be a bat?" Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F).

The idea of an illusion of consciousness implies that there is consciousness. Without consciousness, there would be no illusion.

That's true, but it goes even further. There's no such thing as international law. There is only other countries' laws, treaties, and conventions. No sovereign nation willingly subjects itself to another nation's laws, for that is giving up some of its sovereignty.

I'm interested in where this line of thinking leads because I'm unsatisfied with all the current thinking about consciousness. I'm not gonna write three essays here, but I feel there are some arguments that: consciousness does not necessarily arise from physical matter (though practically speaking it does seem to), consciousness influences physical reality (this is from an argument about why conscious valence so closely matches evolutionarily adaptiveness), and that there's not a really solid argument that a human is conscious but a rock or a city isn't (because there isn't a place you can draw the line).

If physical reality is reality, consciousness breaks all the rules. I'm eager to hear other theories with more explanatory power.

Sometimes life just works out in a way that appears discriminatory. This is a consequence of the clustering illusion. I was on a very small team of developers. The team was all men. That was unsurprising, given the relative gender distributions in the field. My boss didn't like that look (which could affect his reputation) and had only bad options.

My point is that diversity is a radioactive topic. Sometimes you can't win. There is not an answer that will make everybody happy.