Title: What Must Be Preserved? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Engineering Requirements for Mind Preservation
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) April 1, 2026 Thomas A. Ryan 8 citations
Efforts to preserve human consciousness through whole-brain emulation, cryonics, or brain-computer interfaces rarely consult theories of what consciousness actually is, yet which theory one adopts radically changes the engineering requirements. Eight major theories of consciousness were evaluated against nine criteria for preservation. The theories split 4-3-1 on whether consciousness depends on biological substrate. Required information storage ranges from roughly 1–10 terabytes under Attention Schema Theory to physically impossible under Orchestrated Objective Reduction. Required computation spans from 10^15 FLOPS to formally uncomputable.