Article URL: https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2026-05-09-digital-consciousness.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067556 Points: 31 # Comments: 32

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. 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. 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 completely impaired – undermining their ability to report accurately on their own well-being. While I am inclined to believe that language models can functionally introspect – and that they might even be good at it – I believe that the architecture of current digital computers prevents them from phenomenal introspection. Specifically, when a language model claims they are experiencing a particular qualia, while this might be an accurate functional self-report, I do not believe that we should be confident that this correlates with the phenomena they might be experiencing. The reasons I believe this are as follows. I’ll expand on these in the next section: