Abstract

Two independent arguments are presented that jointly entail a strong physical uniqueness requirement for genuine self-awareness. The first shows that if self-awareness were purely algorithmic, infinitely many mutually incompatible conscious interpretations could be ascribed to any single physical process, rendering the ascription of one particular consciousness arbitrary and meaningless. The second demonstrates that even if self-awareness requires a specific physical substrate, the underlying algorithm cannot remain substrate-independent without generating causal contradictions when conscious systems modify their own algorithms. The only consistent position is that genuine self-awareness arises exclusively in physically unique systems executing processes that no other physical system can faithfully replicate. This conclusion provides indirect logical support for theories that tie consciousness to non-classical (especially quantum) processes in the brain that are inherently non-emulable on arbitrary substrates.