Good points, and we've done a lot of back and forth on the subject over on the Consciousness thread. I would contend that the question of consciousness is never moot. A cyborg without consciousness that can mimic conscious beings to the point of fooling them into thinking it has consciousness doesn't suddenly mean it actually has consciousness, and to equate the two by calling it moot could have disastrous consequences. Imagine thinking that upon the death of your body you'll simply upload yourself to an AI framework and continue experiencing life, when in fact all your doing is sending a bunch of instructions to a complex marionette; a dancing machine that experiences nothing.
So although AI may be simply a matter of sufficient sensory capability and processing power, consciousness seems to require something else, like for the components that make up the processors to be made of specific materials arranged in a specific manner. I often use the analogy of a magnet. To address the specific comment:
"... I don’t see any good argument that silicon, instead of carbon, can’t be a excellent medium for experience.”
Someone without knowledge of electromagnetism but highly skilled at design and construction could hypothetically model something out of bits and pieces of metal and plastic that looks exactly like an electromagnet. But unless that metal is conductive, nothing will happen when electricity is applied, so even if some animatronics expert creates a lifelike AI, it certainly doesn't guarantee that when the electricity is applied, consciousness will suddenly just "pop out".
It is entirely possible, and IMO very likely, that consciousness requires processor circuits to not only to to be arranged in a very specific way ( like wire needs to be wound around a core in a spiral fashion to produce a magnetic field ), but that it also needs to be made out of specific materials ( like the wire needs to be conductive and the core needs to be ferrous ). Simply switching from carbon to silicon might not work at all. There's even still some debate as to whether or not brains are consciousness generators. Personally I think they are, but certain answers to these questions have yet to be ascertained, and until then we're no closer at all to solving the problem.
