David Hillel Gelernter, Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, makes an important point when he states that consciousness will not arise in digital computers. I completely agree with him when he points out the centrality of qualia, and dismisses digital computers as a potential platform for consciousness.

Primary experience is essential to the operation of the conscious mind. To be conscious means to have experiences, including not only emotions but the primary multi-sensory experiences themselves with their qualia.

This is the new, anti-cognitivist, direction of the search for a platform from which artificial consciousness might arise. In a nutshell, artificial life must precede strong AI and artificial consciousness. There are many projects underway which will coalesce into very promising possibilities within decades.

This whole line of multidisciplinary scientific inquiry might seem off-topic, or too speculative for "Habitable Zone," but it seems to me to be the most momentous challenge to science in this century, and is extremely relevant to space exploration, as it is to our general social viability.

As far as "virtue" is concerned, both normative and moral aspects would evolve in the dynamics of community efforts and dialogue in a world where constant interaction between human and post-human would be implicit. The philosophically lucid person capable of sustaining a strenuous colloquium with the new beings in a "grammatical clean room" would become more important than any head of state.