On Aug 15, 2009, Martine Rothblatt made a post to the Institute for Emerging Ethics & Technologies: "Can Consciousness be Created in Software?". Theoreticians have been debating this question at least since we first started using the concept of software with the first computational devices.

The goal of this open survey topic is to get a handle on how well accepted either side of this issue is, and the most popular reasons for why. And to track this consensus going forward as ever more scientific data comes in.