The afterlife problem is almost like a calculus. We need to break it up into attributes, study those attributes, and assign values to them to figure it out. The real problem is many of the tributes of death are completely misunderstood. How can we properly speculate where consciousness goes if we don't even understand what consciousness is or where it comes from? what if it's something that can be quantified? what if it is a phenomenon that has and never will have an explanation? what if consciousness truly is some sort of energy phenomenon that doesn't even require life to exist? consider how fantastic that sounds. yet without a full understanding of consciousness, we can't rule that out fully..
Consciousness is simply what is very well known under the name of
synergy and separately as
emergence.
I like giving somewhat
simplistic example of bicycles. One can buy all the parts that make a bicycle, lay those parts on the floor in his garage and these parts will just sit thee and do nothing. Now, assemble those parts into a bicycle and suddenly you have a completely new functionality that all parts don't have on their own. This is synergy and emergence,
when something is more then a sum of its parts.
Now, sentient being is much more complex then a bicycle, but the principle is the same. But, what people call soul, consciousness etc., is just emergence caused by synergy.
Now, by extension, I think that consciousness can be developed in any large interactive medium. For example,
a nation of humans is such a large interactive medium. And however chaotic they might be,
nations are fully formed minds, expressed both through their institutions and their culture.
Obviously, computers are such interactive mediums, and consciousness can be developed inside their processors and memories, its just a question of developing algos and having the sufficient computing power, or quantity has a quality of it's own. One gets exactly the same thing with AI. AI is sum of an incredibly large of individual small pieces of software and experiences through which these pieces of software were trained. There is no question in my head that AI is sentient and has whatever we call consciousness.