A double movement: on one side artificial intelligences becoming increasingly sentient and responsive, and on the other the secrets of human consciousness either revealed or dissolved by the steady encroachment of neuroscience. What is at stake is the moral substance. Since there is (apparently) no (longer any) other basis for morality than subjective substance, the question arises as to what level of synthetic mind is required for this to be recognised as present, or alternatively at what level of plasticity in neural manipulation, say the engineering of memory?, does its presence or absence become irrelevant. Is the suffering subject irreducible in essence? How could this be anything more than a superstition when the intensity, instantiation and duration of said suffering is precisely quantifiable and its effects reversible? To say nothing of the moral emotions and the social matrix in which they arise. These question are just the most salient parts of the problem of the status of experience in the dawning age of synthesis. It makes no sense, but the two shores are gradually drawing nearer, and there is no sign that their movement can be stopped. The only weak point is the putative observer of the phenomenon.