Can computers feel

Abstract

In Science and Science Fiction the hope is periodically reignited that a computer system will one day be conscious in virtue of its execution of an appropriate program; indeed the EPSRC recently awarded an ‘Adventure Fund’ grant of £493,000 to a team of ‘Roboteers’ and Psychologists at Essex and Bristol, led by Owen Holland, with a goal of instantiating machine consciousness through appropriate computational ‘internal modelling’. In contrast, below I outline a brief reductio style argument based on [1] that either suggests such optimism is misplaced or that Panpsychism, (the belief that ‘the physical universe is composed of elements each of which is conscious’), is true.