An Information-Processing Framework for Substrates of Consciousness: A Naturalistic Approach to Humans, Artificial Intelligence, and the Question of God

Abstract

This paper presents an information-processing framework for examining consciousness across biological and artificial substrates. It treats humans and artificial intelligence as information-processing systems implemented on different physical substrates and evaluates claims using methodological naturalism, testability, consistency with established knowledge, and parsimony. The paper examines the epistemic status of several questions at the intersection of philosophy of mind, consciousness science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of religion. It reviews arguments concerning an interventionist God, including the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, religious diversity, cognitive explanations of religious belief, causal closure, and major theistic responses. It then reviews evidence concerning the dependence of human mental states on brain activity, major scientific theories of consciousness, and current approaches to assessing possible machine consciousness. A further section examines the hypothesis of consciousness transfer between biological and artificial substrates, including questions concerning functionalism, substrate independence, personal identity, whole-brain emulation, and gradual replacement. The paper's main methodological contribution is an epistemic grading framework that distinguishes empirical, theoretical, and philosophical claims according to their evidential support, testability, consistency, and parsimony. The framework emphasizes the distinction between what is empirically established, what is theoretically plausible, and what remains speculative or philosophically contested. This work is a conceptual analysis and literature review rather than an experimental study. It is presented as an open-access research paper and is not represented as a peer-reviewed journal publication.