Steve Furber
Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
Steve Furber is a professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester and a pioneer of computer architecture. He was a principal designer of the ARM processor, the architecture that powers most mobile devices, and he later turned to brain-inspired computing.
Furber leads the SpiNNaker project, a massively parallel supercomputer built to simulate spiking neural networks in real time. The full machine holds more than one million ARM cores and is designed to simulate on the order of a billion neurons at biological speed. The successor machine, SpiNNcloud, was brought to operation at TU Dresden in 2025.
His work is a direct test of the substrate-independence thesis, because it asks whether the dynamic organization of neural computation, run at the right speed in silicon, is sufficient to reproduce the brain’s characteristic activity. He treats consciousness as an engineering and measurement question rather than a metaphysical one.
Known for. SpiNNaker, the million-core spiking neural network supercomputer, ARM processor architecture
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Steve Furber is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.