As an atheist, "religious claptrap" tends to contain more wisdom than average. Not inherently, but rather simply because reverence allows it to endure while more direct wisdom is readily thrown away for the sake of expedience. I think this is like one of the main themes of the piece itself.

All of the simplistic rejections in this thread, people looking to quickly assuage their cognitive dissonance rather than doing ten minutes of work holding conflicting thoughts in their head, make me think we are truly damned.

Can you explain why you think that it shouldn't have weight?

Ignorance of a topic does not imply its invalidity

Because religions don't survive unless they describe the world as we see it at least somewhat accurately, albeit at a high abstraction level. They're blurry but often not wrong.

I think the observations and criticisms in this article are pretty good, regardless of who wrote it. We desperately need to figure out what consciousness as we know it, is. It's possible that computers running the right program can possess human-like consciousness, but it would be a shame if we pass the torch to AIs without checking first and it turns out that they're unconscious matter. It would also be a shame if we attempt to enslave a new conscious species.

To echo another idea in the article, our incomplete understanding of consciousness/observation is probably why we don't have a unified description of physics. These are just rough intuitions, but I've written about these and related ideas in more detail in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49472348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034305

The part near the end about harmonic coexistence can perhaps be modernized/translated to mean game theory with observer-dependent values/payoffs, which is something I've been thinking about recently, and we need to figure this out quite soon in order to prevent an inescapable race to the bottom. For the first time in history, one can expand one's own intelligence at will. The observable future may be short and boring if we don't find a new way to cooperate/coexist with one another in symbiosis. We may get stuck in a race to increase one's own compute capacity indefinitely to keep up with eachother in adversarial games, or perhaps be forced to merge with one another to form a giant organism, or perhaps spread out at near light speed, or just die. Many people who are leading the charge in AI and technology development are philosophically bankrupt to the point of denying their own consciousness, so it is accurate to say that we are an unconscious people. There are bright exceptions like Elon Musk, but even he does not understand what the question means when he asks "what is truth?" or "what is the meaning of life?", and it would serve him well to pause for a second to look inward and define what he means by each word of the query instead of assuming that expanding out into the universe will automatically yield an ultimate answer.