Costs of Embodiment
Creating “digital sentience” is a lot harder than it looks. Standard Qualia Research Institute arguments for why it is either difficult, intractable, or literally impossible to create complex, computationally meaningful, bound experiences out of a digital computer (more generally, a computer with a classical von Neumann architecture) include the following three core points:
Even if you replicate the input-output mapping of a system, that does not mean you are replicating the internal causal structure of the system. If bound experiences are dependent on specific causal structures, they will not happen automatically without considerations for the nature of their substrate (which might have unique, substrate-specific, causal decompositions). Chalmers’ (1995) “principle of organizational invariance” assumes that replicating a system’s functional organization at a fine enough grain will reproduce identical conscious experiences. However, this may be question-begging if bound experiences require holistic physical systems (e.g. quantum coherence). In such a case, the “components” of the system might be irreducible wholes, and breaking them down further would result in losing the underlying causal structure needed for bound experiences. This suggests that consciousness might emerge from physical processes that cannot be adequately captured by classical functional descriptions, regardless of their granularity.
More so, whether we realize it or not, it is always us (indeed complex bound experiences) who interpret the meaning of the input and the output of a physical system. It is not interpreted by the system itself. This is because the system has no real “points of view” from which to interpret what is going on. This is a subtle point, and will merely mention it for now, but a deep exposition of this line of argument can be found in The View From My Topological Pocket (2023).
