Is AI Conscious (II): Silicon, Light and Pure Mathematics

This article examines the potential emergence of consciousness from non-biological substrates—specifically silicon-based circuits (as in GPUs), photonic computational architectures, and purely mathematical or algorithmic structures. It argues that while such systems may instantiate the functional and informational conditions associated with conscious processing, the existence of subjective experience within them remains, by principle, epistemically undecidable to any external observer.