I don't think consciousness will end up mattering very much. It matters a lot to us because we're conscious and it's not totally clear that moral considerations

I don't think consciousness will end up mattering very much. It matters a lot to us because we're conscious and it's not totally clear that moral considerations apply to things that aren't conscious. But I think it will turn out that non-conscious computer programs will be able to do more or less everything we can do. > This is not a valid argument - the conclusion ('[computers would] need some kind of hardware to be conscious, hardware that we don't know how to build') does not ineluctably follow from the premise ('Computers need multiple cores to do parallel computations' or even just 'Hardware matters'.) I'm not claiming that my argument proves anything. The point I'm making is that simulating something in software isn't magic. You can't write a computer program that executes code in parallel and run it on a single core CPU and observe parallelism. You need to have hardware that supports parallelism. I think it's very likely that this is also the case for consciousness. You can simulate consciousness. But to actually achieve conscious experience, you need a certain kind of hardware. This is just my opinion, there's no proof here.