Note: This is meant as an accessible introduction to an interesting, novel, and not widely-known idea about digital sentience primarily due to Andrés Gómez Emilsson and David Pearce. See links at the bottom for the original arguments on which this summary is based. I do my best to portray them as accurately as possible.

Note 2: We use terms like consciousness, sentience, and experience interchangeably. These each refer to intrinsic “what-it's-like”-ness.

Part 1: Reimagining the Problem

tl;dr: The debate about digital sentience is often entirely framed in terms of the algorithms that a computer executes, implicitly assuming that consciousness is computational. If we instead assume that consciousness is the inherent nature of the physical, then we can rule out systems that cannot create unified, bound experiences from being sentient without having to make reference to the algorithms they execute.

Introduction

It seems like people who think about whether modern digital computers can have subjective experience often run into the two following contradictory ideas:

First, that computers can’t be conscious, since they are simply wires and logic gates sending 1s and 0s according to the user’s instruction. It feels like there is something about biological brains that is fundamentally different, as demonstrated by how strange it sounds prima facie to say that a computer can experience pain or pleasure.

But secondly, most people think that consciousness must come from the brain, and the brain is entirely controlled by physical laws. Therefore we should be able to specify how the brain processes information, and emulate its algorithms on a sufficiently powerful computer. Then, in theory, such a computer would also emulate the brain’s conscious experience.

Of course, these are just intuitions, not rigorous arguments. Yet they both feel quite compelling. Given that these conclusions are contradictory, at least one of the arguments must be incorrect. In order to understand more precisely how one of these arguments can be invalid, it is useful to formulate and label their assumptions more formally.

The first intuition relies on two assumptions: that computers are simply wires and logic gates (A1), and that wires and logic gates cannot have subjective experience (A2). The second relies on the three assumptions: that human consciousness comes from the bra...

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