Sorry to add even more to this thread but again I suggest we have something regarding consciousness that we never had with flight, we have direct experience of it.

Recently I read of a group who said 'self awareness' might be nothing more than actual awareness of self, so they gave their robots an internal model of their environment, and an internal model of the robot situated in that environment.

Then they let the robot rehearse what to do in its 'head' to find the best solution to a problem before it acted.

After reading that article I realised that I did the same thing in my head, albeit very quickly. Before I do anything, my brain runs scenarios and then provides me with the best course of action. The scenarios might be provided by a set of neurons whose sole purpose is to do that, a bit like spacial neurons, or the scenarios might be something I consciously trigger, I don't know.

I know that I regularly run conscious mental modelling whenever I build anything.

I do it when I go climbing.

And I've learned recently that a subset of people I climb with can't do that. They can't model their own movements in their head. They have to actually climb to know what to do, and even then, they don't remember what they did. They tell me their body does the climbing for them and they kind of go along for the ride.

I know people now who can't speak to themselves inside their head with someone else's voice. In fact they know they talk to themselves, but they can't tell me what voice they are using. I asked them to make it louder and softer in their head and they were surprised to realise they could shout inside their own head. Yet they still can't identify an actual 'voice' even though they know they have one.

And this is what we never had with flight. We can't fly. As you say, we also can't think in 10 dimensions and perhaps a machine that can will be our breakthrough, but what we do have with consciousness is direct experience of it.

I'm not suggesting that biomimicry is the path to a working intelligence, but the fact we currently inhabit a working intelligence gives us a place to test ideas that we never had with flight.