Can a machine be conscious?

Consciousness depends on how a system is organized, and no particular material is required. A person and a machine rest on the same lowest layer, native observers repairing their disagreements, and what separates them is how their parts are organized on top of it. In OPH, experience is owned boundary repair read from the inside, where a system reads its own state and feeds those readings into its own repair. A machine organized that way has experiences. A machine that only produces the right outputs, with no repair of its own, lacks that interior, however human it sounds. Whatever duplicates the organization duplicates the experience. Which machines are built that way, and how finely, are questions for experiment.

Also in Epilogue: The Last Rung, Appendix A: Eighteen Questions.