The AI consciousness debate is asking the wrong question

The debate turns on whether silicon can do what neurons do computationally. That's the wrong question.

The prior question — which nobody has asked — is whether silicon can do what neurons do biochemically.

Here's the observation that reframes everything: general anaesthesia switches consciousness off with chemical precision while leaving the body completely operational. The brain keeps processing. The heart keeps beating. Consciousness disappears. We've had this off switch for over a century and we've never asked what it's switching off.

That matters for AI because it demonstrates that consciousness has a specific biological dependency. Not just a correlate — a dependency. Disrupt the right biological condition and consciousness stops, even though everything else keeps running.

Which means the substrate independence assumption — that consciousness is purely about computational organisation, not physical substrate — is unwarranted. It has never been tested. And anaesthesia gives us specific reason to doubt it.

Different anaesthetic agents work through completely different pharmacological mechanisms. All of them remove consciousness. The prediction that follows: they must share a common effect on whatever biological condition consciousness requires. Finding that shared condition would identify the dependency — and would tell us whether non-biological systems can meet it.

Until that question is answered, every confident claim about machine consciousness in either direction is built on an unexamined assumption.

Full paper here: Link