I don’t think any of us will live to see a real understanding of human consciousness. The brain is too confusing, too confounding. We’ll get there eventually, but it’s going to be a long slog. Paul Allen is currently trying to reverse engineer the brain, fully aware of the mammoth challenge. From Matthew Herper in Forbes:

“Understanding the brain, Allen argues, is much like a being a medieval blacksmith trying to reverse engineer a jet plane. It’s not just that you don’t understand how the wing attaches to the fuselage or what makes the engine go. You don’t even know the basic theory of how air going over a wing creates lift. ‘Moore’s Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience,’ Allen says. ‘The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does. The computer is a very regular structure. It’s very uniform. It’s got a bunch of memory, and it’s got a little element that computes bits of memory and combines them with each other and puts them back somewhere. It’s a very simple thing.

‘So for someone to learn how to program a computer, in most cases, a human being can do it. You can start programming. I did it in high school. Me and Bill Gates and our friends did that. Probably in a few months we were programming and probably understood what there was to understand about computing within a few years of diving into it.’

In the human brain, designed by evolution, every tiny part is very different from every other tiny part. ‘It’s hideously complex,’ Allen says. And it’s going to take ‘decades and decades’ of more research to understand.”