The fact that we think we can observe and comprehend a mechanism doing the observation does not preclude things we cannot see. You might be able to pan a cctv camera and get some insight about the camera itself if you find a reflection, but you can’t pan it over to the linux driver. It is not a given that all of the observer exists within the observable universe.
Of course not! Regardless of whether the core phenomenon is fundamentally impossible to explain (which I think it has to be for philosophical reasons), it’s an incredibly productive question to ask/am also curious about cutting edge theories and related findings.
It seems short sighted to suggest we can’t find out things about consciousness in a similar way.
We can almost definitely learn a lot more about consciousness related phenomenon than we already know through science, and I don’t know the answer to OP’s question about the current cutting edge of that, but I think it’s always going to be about related phenomenon rather than consciousness itself. Unlike other phenomenon, which are only revealed to us because aspects of their existence appear in our observable universe, we don’t really “observe” the core experience of consciousness. The goalposts can be moved indefinitely whenever consciousness related phenomenon are made sense of. The fundamental experience is not observable, which means we can’t really see that black box at all. To me the mystery of that is much more satisfying than thinking we can ever get a definitive answer.
It is easy (and cognitively useful) to forget that, when the indirection is very reliable.
As far as consciousness, we won’t just have to speculate based on our own consciousness. As artificial minds become highly self-aware (a functional ingredient of consciousness), we will be able to construct very controlled experiments.
There will be endless numbers of experiments we will be able to do once we can edit self-aware entities and both externally query and internally monitor them.
That's what the observability issue is about. Heck, I think you're conscious, but I cannot know for sure.
There is no way to distinguish between an unconscious machine mimicking the functional aspects of consciousness we are able to indirectly observe and compare to our own experience and something having the same experience.
We could easily (and I think almost definitely are given the current pure symbolic manipulation track) be doing the same thing as a jungle cargo cult constructing an air strip out of sticks. Studying that won’t tell us how planes work.
Obviously advanced AI is more sophisticated than that and may have more legitimate parallels to consciousness, but I think it’s fundamentally impossible to know what’s a core part of the conscious experience and what just looks superficially similar to the output of conscious beings.
The current generation of AI are clearly not at all conscious and are “just” (don’t want to diminish the work) very good parrots generating image and text output from a given input in a way a whole bunch of conscious humans already have. But we’re already getting cargo cults and people who are anthropomorphizing and considering them comparable to humans.
There’s a danger in studying artificial models of an underlying phenomenon to learn about the phenomenon. That method of study is inherently very limited and extremely difficult to keep calibrated to the underlying phenomenon.
As noted before, all observations are indirect. That has not been the unique challenge for studying consciousness.
The unique challenge has been an inability to create constructive or destructive experiments.
We didn't know how to construct consciousness candidates or precursors, of varying kinds to study. We are getting close to that (i.e. self-awareness as a functional quality is certainly a precursor.)
And we have not been able to create controlled demolition of an consciousness candidates, due to the morals of human experiments. (But our artificial minds will be alterable and destructible at will, to test hypothesis.)
Our conscious experience is in fact a unique phenomenon because it is all perceivable phenomenon.
You can create as many self reflective machines as you like and experiment on them and compare them to output from humans, and maybe you’ll learn things, but you can’t ever get to looking at consciousness at all. There is no indirect or direct data you can use to compare all of your experience to something that sits inside a fraction of it.
What you’re talking about are behavioral experiments comparing the reported thoughts and actions of separate acknowledged conscious actors, ie other people, to the internal states and outputs of machines.
You’re not looking at consciousness when you do that. Looking at consciousness requires looking at all experience. Which is fundamentally impossible. When you try to look at all of experience as a single object to study nothing is differentiated. There is zero information.
The problem with consciousness is that we have no ability to measure it objectively because it is an entirely subjective phenomenon.
You have no way of knowing if I am conscious or just a sufficiently elaborate machine doing a really great job of acting like I am (a p-zombie).
Personally, I lean towards panpsychism. I assume I am not special and that everything in the universe, or to put it another way the entire universe itself, has an experience of being.
(1) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/#LimiReas
In fact, you would not even experience the disappearance of consciousness - because the consciousness that would experience this has disappeared. It is impossible to experience the absence of consciousness.