Our brains ARE computers. Conscious machines are a matter of when, not "if".<p>Think of a computer simulation of every atom of your brain, along with modelling the electrical impulses going through it. It WOULD be you, and it would be really freaked out by the lack of sensory input. Probably you'd need to "anesthetize" parts of it that panic when they detect "you" aren't breathing -- along with other autonomic controls -- or feed them fake information. Otherwise you'd be in a situation where you'd boot up your brain simulation and you'd actually <i>torture</i> a conscious machine. If you simulated every atom, it <i>would</i> be you! <p>Note also that this would not need to run in real-time. It could be updated in simulated femtosecond steps that could take an arbitrarily large amount of "real" time, without realizing it. Ethics would apply to a software simulation, as far as pain goes, but you could shut it down or pause it without it realizing what happened, as long as it was in a virtual environment. If you gave it physical sensors, it would find it quite jarring to be in the middle of saying something and suddenly have it be 5 days later partway through the sentence!