I'm excited about the latest developments in AI too, but RL and consciousness are pretty extreme apples and oranges. I agree with Searle that it's a bit insane to wave away the role or even existence of consciousness ('metaphysical topic', etc.), especially in the context of developing a stronger AI. Just because we don't yet have a mapping of consciousness to types of structures, virtual or otherwise, that could be implemented in an AI system, doesn't mean we should pretend like we've moved beyond it.