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.
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... (read 1162 more words →)