Words like Intelligence, Consciousness, Thinking and maybe some other words describing brain activities are very hard to explain for even the most respected scientist from the best universities out there...
These respected and well funded people have up to now provided no satisfactory definition for what intelligence really is and when it comes to describing consciousness they have absolutely no idea what it could be. The same is with definition of thinking. If you want to make some engineer or IT guy feel embarrassed then ask him for consciousness. Unless he is some stupid not caring guy he/she will feel very uneasy talking about what consciousness is. The most probable answer will be that up to now we (please exclude me!) don’t know if consciousness exists at all. And yet this term is relevant, consciousness does exist, it describes some very real things happening in our mind.
How is it with me, the inventor of real artificial general intelligence, do I know the definitions for these words? Of course I do, I have invented (constructed) brain algorithms that emulate functions of human brain so I know very exactly what is going on inside our brains. According to my brain algorithms it is possible to construct machines that will behave exactly (or very similarly) like humans.
When you want to understand such words mentioned above you have to look first at their origin. These words have been created many centuries ago. It was ancient Greeks who already used the term intelligence. It has to be understood that at this ancient time people had no idea what is going on inside human brain (unfortunately so do respected academicians today!). I believe that ancient Greeks were even not sure if the human mental activities are to be linked with the brain. Yet they created such words and they are being used up to now. It means that such words are describing certain brain activities without knowing exactly (without describing) what is hiding behind these processes in our brains.
When I invented brain algorithms I was looking at these words and was trying to figure out what part of my brain algorithms could be assigned to these particular terms. And I have succeeded! I know what definition of intelligence is (my machines will be as intelligent as people, even more), I know what is exactly hiding behind the word consciousness because I have put consciousness inside my brain algorithms (machines with my brain algorithms will be fully conscious). And I also now what thinking is because my intelligent robots are thinking the same way as humans do!
If you want to know what is hiding behind all these interesting words then you have to wait until first intelligent robots emerge because right now my brain algorithms are secret and I am not going to explain it to you unless you want to construct my intelligent robots.
Just be sure that these terms DO EXIST, they are very real things!
So why all these academicians (engineers, computer scientists and even neuro-scientists) out there have no clue about these terms? The answer is very simply, they have no clue about how human brain is working! Yet, they are very clever to tell us daily in the media how artificial intelligence is progressing and how great this thing already is… Very nice world we are living in.