Comment by txrx0000

These are good intuitions. I'll add some more:

Orangutans can drive a golf cart, there are videos of that from the pre-AI era. General anesthetics that work on humans also tend to work on them. There is just a smooth gradient of brain evolution.

We don't know exactly what in the brain gets disrupted during general anesthesia (or a baseball bat to the head, for that matter) that causes consciousness to go away, but inquiry has been trending towards lower-level explanations over time, and it's unlikely that it can be fully explained at the biochemical level. We probably need to go down to physics.

Once we're at the physics level, there will be testable hypotheses that work on machines. For example: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for human-like consciousness.

Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness). If I want to be philosophically rigorous, then I will keep in mind that I can wake up from a simulation at any moment. But until then, physics rules.

It may be that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain, which is changing from moment to moment as cells reorganize, so the definition of "I" is constantly changing in a ship of Theseus kind of way. It may be that nobody has the ideal definition of consciousness (or anything, really), like how nobody has the same definition of an apple even if we're looking at the same apple, because the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view, so our definitions are only mostly similar. This might be why frontier physics is stuck, because we're current assuming that observations/observers can be defined in a universally identical way. If it turns out that all instances of experience/experiencers are unique and never truly identical, then solving the hard problem of consciousness may end up being equivalent to finding a unified theory of physics, because we'd be trying to describe everything one can observe.