Episode Details

I should introduce myself briefly. I'm an independent researcher, striving to understand human consciousness. My research is available at smoothbrains.net. I often work in loose collaboration with a nonprofit called the Qualia Research Institute. We hope to use human phenomenology to inform the construction of structural models of subjective experience – both to help evaluate the viability of different theories of consciousness, and to better model the welfare of sentient beings.

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 [...]

---

Outline:

(04:17) My position statement

(08:50) My argument

(09:07) 1. The translation problem

(10:26) Building a physicalist translation function

(19:39) 2. The simplicity problem

(20:31) Computationalist translation functions are observer dependent

(25:17) 3. The introspection problem

(27:44) Digital hardware prohibits phenomenal introspection

(29:32) Conclusion

(32:56) My research

(33:33) 1. Is the brain an optical computer?

(34:16) 2. If the brain is an optical computer, how is it constructed?

(34:59) 3. How do we ensure the well-being of conscious computers?

---

First published:
May 9th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TjwRyZdyhouePJrzP/if-digital-computers-are-conscious-they-are-conscious-at-the

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

---

---

Listen Now