The DemystifySci Podcast Why Digital Minds Can’t Wake Up - Andrés Gómez Emilsson , DemystifySci #407
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Mar 9, 2026 Andrés Gómez Emilsson, director at the Qualia Research Institute and founder of the Co-Sentience Initiative, studies consciousness, valence, and sentience. He discusses why digital systems can mimic intelligence but lack unified, lived experience. Short takes cover boundaries, holistic updates, PageRank-style unity, why AI expression feels hollow, and where simulations stop and real minds begin.
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Digital Computers Lack Conscious Boundaries
- Digital computers likely cannot produce unified conscious moments because they lack an objective, causally significant boundary that makes internal states behave as a unit.
- Andrés contrasts cellular automata (Conway's Game of Life) where local update rules never create holistic unity with systems that require true boundary-based integration to explain simultaneity of qualia.
Boundaries Plus Holistic Updates Enable Unity
- A candidate 'tier three' universe needs local update rules plus a boundary-making mechanism and a holistic update rule so boundaries have causal effects.
- Andrés proposes computing a PageRank-like equilibrium for all nodes inside a boundary in one holistic step as a toy model of integrated experience.
Consciousness Might Use The Universe's Holistic Computation
- Physical coherent states (like quantum coherence) let the universe 'compute' a global solution without stepwise local calculation, suggesting consciousness might exploit similar holistic substrates.
- Andrés likens running a coherent physical state to running the experiment rather than doing intractable classical simulation.