theory

Sorry for taking so long to respond.

Do social relations in the production of (self) consciousness, identity and/or intelligence ever figure into it?

Yes! There is some serious work on theories of consciousness in neuroscience and it's hard to sift through the bullshit, but there are probably as many or more philosophers as there are experimental neuroscientists published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, some of which must discuss these dependencies. Unfortunately, when specifically computational neuroscience people start talking about consciousness it can be especially hard to tell if they're bullshitting because their models/theories tend to involve a lot of complicated maths (for example, Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory) and they aren't always testable/falsifiable in the straightforward way a lot of computational neuroscience work is.

I guess I'm also asking, how the fuck do they even know what they are looking for without a concept of what it is?

They largely don't really know what they're looking for from the computational side and so I think the more prominent directions of research activity in the neuroscience of consciousness tend to approach the problem from the other direction by observing and perturbing circuits that are known to be performing some computation that is demonstrably important for producing some aspect of consciousness and then observing post-perturbation neurological activity and the environment or the organism's behavior

Have you read any of Negarestani's Intelligence and Spirit? He seems to be trying to formulate a way to even begin to think about what a general (artificial) intelligence could be conceptually, through Hegel, Kant, and what I assume are a bunch of analytic and scientific writers I know little about tbh.

I haven't, but I read a quick description that says Negarestani rejects the ubiquity of mind and the inevitable emergence/evolution of a superintelligence, so I'm interested in learning how they formulate and argue those rejections.