For artificially intelligent computers to become conscious, functionalism would have to be true. This is the necessary condition. But functionalism being true is, by itself, not enough: information processing by itself is not sufficient for consciousness. The second assumption is that the kind of information processing that is sufficient for consciousness is also that which underpins intelligence. This is the assumption that consciousness and intelligence are intimately, even constitutively, linked: that consciousness will just come along for the ride. But this assumption is also poorly
...more