In my previous posts on consciousness, I noted that Annaka Harris, David Chalmers and Anil Seth all had some discussion in their books of the likelihood that machine minds could become conscious . I’ll start with the philosophers.

Daniel Dennett thinks consciousness is an illusion, so has nothing useful to say. David Chalmers on the other hand has a lot to say. In his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory Chalmers argues for a general principle that consciousness is an organizational invariant, i.e., that “functional organization fully determines conscious experience. In other words, if a silicon brain is organized identically to a human brain, it will also be conscious. He argues the case for this principle using a thought experiment in which physical components of the brain are replaced one at a time by silicon components. He claims that it makes no sense to think that the consciousness of the brain would either fade as the process continues or disappear at some point.