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Builders of the Hardware Consciousness Research Runs On

Every empirical claim about machine consciousness eventually runs on a piece of hardware somebody had to build. The people on this page built those pieces. They are listed separately from the other researchers on this site for one reason. None of them has published a position on whether consciousness is substrate independent, and this site does not assign one to them.

Mike Davies directs Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab, whose Loihi 2 chip is the first neuromorphic processor with programmable neuron microcode. That feature is what allows a researcher to swap a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron for an Izhikevich neuron on the same silicon, which turns a long standing theoretical argument about neuron models into a controlled experiment. The Loihi 2 architecture paper is explicit that the chip is a research tool for studying neural computation rather than a system designed to satisfy consciousness criteria.

Marcus S. Murbach led TechEdSat-13 at NASA Ames, which in January 2022 flew the first neuromorphic processor to operate in Earth orbit and ran spike-timing-dependent plasticity in the radiation environment of low Earth orbit. That result is the empirical basis for treating orbital deployment of a spiking architecture as an engineering question with measured answers.

Matt Angle founded Paradromics, whose Connexus Direct Data Interface reached first-in-human implantation in 2025 at 421 microwire electrodes per cortical module. Benjamin Rapoport co-founded Neuralink and then founded Precision Neuroscience, whose Layer 7 Cortical Interface records from the cortical surface without penetrating tissue. Their two devices bracket the central trade in cortical interfacing, single unit resolution against tissue damage, and the numbers on both sides set the real distance between current hardware and any claim about bridging a conscious stream.

The reason to track builders alongside theorists is that a theory of consciousness which cannot be run on any available hardware is not yet testable. For the hardware argument in full, see Project Consciousness to Orbit and the Substrate Console. For the full researcher directory, see all consciousness researchers.