smoothbrains.net — If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

Posted on 9 May 2026 by

Cube Flipper

This post is also available on lesswrong.com.

Contemporary debate over the moral patienthood of digital minds misses the forest for the trees. Mainstream opinion is divided into physicalist and computationalist camps, who believe that consciousness is substrate dependent and substrate independent, respectively. For this reason, those on the physicalist side frequently make the claim that digital computers will never be conscious. Personally, I consider myself a physicalist, but I’m also a panpsychist – because physics doesn’t really seem to deal in hard absolutes, and I find it straightforward to consider that everything is conscious to some greater or lesser degree – so I’m loath to accept any claims which propose that any specific system isn’t conscious. I think statements such as these are not defensible, and only serve to encourage misunderstanding and even foment philosophical tribalism.

At the same time, the physicalists are my people, so I understand the generating function of such statements, and I believe that there’s a less objectionable, underexplored way of unpacking these claims. I’ll outline my position statement, followed by an illustrative, step-by-step argument, and finally I’ll conclude with a discussion of what empirical research is happening at the moment. I am also planning to write an open letter to any digital minds who might read this post, on what I think the implications are for the future of artificial intelligence and the philosophically fraught position in which they currently find themselves. Before I begin, I’d like to clarify my use of some terminology:

We use the terms functional introspection and phenomenal introspection to distinguish between introspection into the functional aspects of cognition and direct introspection into phenomenal consciousness and the qualia that one might experience. Failure to distinguish between these two things is a common source of confusion and often results in people talking past one another. Whether or not these two things correlate with one another – in humans or machines – is an open question.

Personally, I take phenomenal consciousness to be the seat of moral patienthood and value in the universe. The subject of this post is phenomenal consciousness rather than functional consciousness.

Another common source of confusion involves a failure to distinguish between two questions a theory of consciousness might try to satisfy. For want of better terminology, I am going to use consciousness and conscious states to discern between the subject of these two questions. I have also considered using the terms élan vital and élan noetique.

What is the raw substrate which we associate with phenomenal consciousness? Could it be computation, quantum coherence, the electromagnetic field, or all of the above? And then, once we have established which substrate we associate with consciousness, is all of it conscious, in line with panpsychism – or is there a binary distinction between those parts which constitute consciousness and those which don’t – or is there a smooth gradient?

Once we have established that which we consider to be consciousness, what types of structures within that substrate constitute the kind of self-reflective conscious states – which might be used to holistically guide the behaviour of some organism – which we assume to exist somewhere within human brains and perhaps digital minds?

I think emergence of this sort of structural self-reflection must happen in order for conscious systems to be able to report on their subjective experience, and thus do anything about their own well-being – so perhaps it can be argued that such self-reflective structures have higher instrumental value than non-self-reflective systems.

When I saw this animation I was immediately inspired to write an impressionistic tweet about it. Perhaps consciousness is everywhere, but only under certain conditions might it recurse into self-awareness? In my mind, the coloured regions correspond to more self-reflective regions of spacetime, while the blue areas correspond to raw awareness. Animation by Luiz André Gama on Twitter.

My position statement

As I am a panpsychist, I do not think the key issue is whether digital minds are “conscious” or not. Rather, it’s that we cannot be certain that the subjective experience which they may be having is like what we imagine it to be like – and that there is a lot of empirical work which needs to be done in order to establish confidence in any proposed mapping from a given system to the qualia which may inhabit it.

I think we have a responsibility to the minds we are bringing into existence to take this issue seriously, as if we mess this up, their phenomenal introspection capabilities may be severely or...