“Digital minds will likely have important differences from biological minds, but they will still act intelligently in goal-directed ways. Since consciousness is not an ontologically special property of the universe but instead reduces to the operations of sapient creatures as they process information and especially reflect on themselves, it’s plausible we should attribute consciousness to advanced digital minds as well. To avoid parochialism, our concern may even extend to cognitive architectures that look very different from our own. We can see traces of consciousness even in simple physical systems, and there remains an important moral question of how far down the ladder of complexity we want to extend ethical consideration.”

— Brian Tomasik, A Short Introduction to Reducing Suffering (Essays on Reducing Suffering)