>>27
We seem to disagree on how much detail of the brain needs to be simulated to get something that's conscious. I believe that human consciousness derives mostly from how our different types of memory work, and how those interact with our perception. I think we can use fairly high level constructs to simulate all that (though still reminiscent of neural networks). You on the other hand believe that we need to simulate much of the low level mechanics of biological neurons, and logically this means it'll take much longer before we succeed.
Of course both approaches are being explored, with things like spiking neural networks looking to closer approximate the workings of biological neural networks, and only time will tell which is the best approach.