Reddit reviews Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought

>This could very well be one of those engineering problems like flying, where nature did it first and proved it could be done, but we ultimately end up smashing all her performance records using finely tuned solutions.

People smashed records, yes, but one only has to watch birds in flight to be reminded that people still can't fly, in the sense that birds do, and with the freedom and joy that we once dreamed of, at all.

>I see consciousness as an informational phenomenon. Information must be carried in a material substrate but is not itself material, at least in my view.

I have no doubt you have a lot of reason for holding that view, and I know the informational view has a lot of weight, currently. It's not something I expect to be refutable or falsifiable. A full response would be book-length (specifically this book , Taking Appearance Seriously by Henri Bortoft - review here ) Bortoft gets right into the self-identity/self-differencing stuff, what happens when we read and write, what makes two productions of Hamlet both Hamlet, and so on.

I will say that AI theorists should be wary of succumbing to what Weizenbaum called, as I recall, the 'Lamp-post principle' - you know, like the drunk who looked for his keys under the lamp-post "because that's where the light is". Computers happen to be very good for processing information, and for encryption/decryption. Define consciousness and understanding in those terms, and before you know it you've got a theory that claims computers are theoretically capable of anything.
My view is that reading, writing and understanding resemble informational processes only in limited cases, and in their more degraded forms.