I got undergraduate degrees in physics and EE, went on to get my PhD, and now have my dream job (at least for this point in life). I graduated in 2001 when every investment bank in the world was trying to grab up anyone with an understanding of math.

It just took being more interested in satisfaction with my work than in other things. I spent the early part of the last decade making $8-20k per year, eating ramen noodles, and spending all my time on campus in my lab.

I could have spent that time making 50-100k per year (possibly more) at something that was fairly lackluster and then be out of a job now and broke and stuck in a mortgage that I'll never be able to escape. Instead, my company is trying to find more people like me and is actively hiring and I'm at the cutting edge doing amazing work in my field.
http://www.hhmi.org/jobs/main?action=job&job_id=660

Depends on where you want to go.

I was an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering and Physics and then went straight to a PhD in Biophysics where I ended up working in a behavioral neurobiology lab with all manner of invertebrates where I designed tools to record from their nervous systems and to analyze the data.

Essentially, there's nothing we don't know about the brain. Electrical Engineers have been developing the tools to create computers and feedback sensory systems for over a hundred years (if not longer). If you want to get into this world, I'd recommend looking at control theory. Neural networks like the human brain are "simply" massively paralleled adaptive feedback control systems.

Insects are amazing creatures to study. They represent many highly specialized systems that boil down to specialized sensory-behavior feedback loops with dashes of memory and categorical perception thrown in. They are easy to study in most cases and there are fewer confounding issues than when studying larger brains.

Treating AI as some sort of "other" discipline than adaptive feedback controls is indicative of a wrong idea about the field. AI is object abstraction from multiple sensory modalities and heuristic learning algorithms and state machines which control behavioral outputs.

It's not something different than building a cruise control for a car or a web browser for a PC. These are just dumb forms of AI with limited adaptability.

I prefer the use of the term "non-biological intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence."

higher than what?

I assume you're referring to three dimensional space.

Consciousness takes in MANY dimensions of data.. Ironically, it flattens the 3D world into 2D + a color spectral dimension. Then your brain integrates temperature dimensions if you touch a thing and there's the dimension of sound associated with a space, etc. If you then put the object on your tongue, you can add a dimension of taste.

But I figured your comments were more on the lines of crystals and "energy" dimensions than actual dimensions of non-spacial parameters of objects.

Consciousness is an emergent property of systems, but it is not a state transition where a system all of a sudden has consciousness.

A cruise control system in a car is "conscious" of the rate of the vehicle and the gear that the transmission is in. It is also conscious of the set point that the driver enters into the system. It then expresses a will (control signal) to seek this target velocity which is made manifest as an acceleration or deceleration.

This is no different than a human being expressing a will to pick up a soda with his arm because he is thirsty. There's a level of complexity involved, but consciousness is consciousness. Saying that a cell phone is not conscious is a convention and not a true category of being.

Soul, however, means "intrinsic identity"... Soul is a term that speaks to something intrinsically "this" about an object. It speaks to a religious attitude that exists in western mythology that puts us at odds with the world (i.e. we are here and the world is there). The soul of a table would be the thing about that table that is NOT something else. For example, the soul would be the part of the table separate from the paint and the wood and the bolts and brackets.

In eastern mythology, this notion is discarded. The core of all buddhisms, for example describe the concept of dependent origination which says that no things have intrinsic identity (i.e. when buddha describes "emptiness."). This means that things are entirely "extrinsically" defined. A table, under this notion, is the wood and the metal and the water that fed the tree that made the wood and the sunlight that evaporated that rain in an unending web of linked causations such that any one thing you want to call an "object" is an expression of all things and is, in no way, intrinsically identifiable.

Soul is not consciousness. Consciousness is a property of a computation system with feedback about its current state. To be "conscious" of one's intention is to be aware of it. It's to have information about a thing and to use that information to act. It's the basis of being human. Memories, desires, urges, vision, smell, touch, etc.. These are all coefficients in complex and noisy equations that produce a extraordinarily complex range of behaviors that interact with other humans in society to create another layer of richness, but there's nothing fundamentally different between this and a microprocessor hooked up to many peripherals in a PC and then hooked up to many PCs via the internet, etc.

There's nothing "unconscious" about your cell phone other than that egoism desire to create such a false dichotomy. Machines are already conscious... They just don't have programmed desires that are similar to ours or faces that look like ours.