The creation of easily satisfied preferences in digital minds does not require controversial assumptions about machine consciousness because preferences can be understood functionally

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• We hypothesize that general computational machines with sufficient resources possess the necessary and sufficient means to implement consciousness, and that successful implementation can be established via analysis or testing.hypothesis0.832
  The central hypothesis of the paper
• Engineering digital mind preferences to support human incumbents may be permissible because programmers inevitably make choices when building AI and there may be no default to defer to, unlike human reproductionclaim0.828
  Addresses the procedural ethics of creating digital minds disposed to protect human interests
• If computational functionalism is correct, then some computations suffice for consciousness and the question is which ones and when they will exist in AI.hypothesis0.819
  Conditional underlying the consciousness route.
• The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis rests on metaphysical assumptions summarized as computationalist functionalism, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the hypothesis.claim0.818
  Paper's statement of the metaphysical presuppositions of the MCH
• Consciousness remains without an agreed scientific characterization, without a validated theory connecting mechanism to experience, and without criteria for establishing its presence or absence in any systemclaim0.807
  CIMC's characterization of the current state of the field motivating its research program
• Caviola & Saad 2025: expert survey finds broad consensus that digital minds capable of subjective experience are plausible within this century, many expecting such systems to proactively claim consciousnessfinding0.800
  Expert forecast cited to establish urgency of the research question
• It is hard to coherently deny functionalism in any reasonable theory of consciousness, since any theory must tie consciousness to certain configurations, which smuggles functionalism back in.claim0.800
  Paper's argument that all viable theories of consciousness implicitly rely on structural-functional criteria
• General computational machines with sufficient resources possess the necessary and sufficient means to implement consciousnesshypothesis0.799
  CIMC's central testable hypothesis grounding the entire research program