Consciousness
What is consciousness? And could robots have it? is a topic of discussion in Philosophy Now magazine. Here is an article from the issue to give you background information on the debate and perhaps spark an interest in the subject.
A Ridiculously Brief Overview of Consciousness
A five-minute guide to the debate by Rick Lewis.
Modern philosophy of mind began with René Descartes (1596-1650) who argued that we each consist of two different entities: a material body subject to all the laws of physics and an immaterial mind, which isn’t. This theory is therefore known as Cartesian Dualism. He said that the mind was connected with the brain via the pineal gland. But exactly how, to take a very simple example, does my wish to scratch my nose result in my arm being raised and my finger making scratching motions? How can something non-physical – the mind – have a causal effect on something physical? Over the next few centuries, various modified versions of Dualism tried to address this problem. According to epiphenomenalism, for instance, the interaction was only one way: the brain affected the mind, but the mind had no effect on the brain. The mind was therefore a passenger carried along in a purely physical machine, with only the illusion of an ability to influence events. Alternatively, according to occasionalism, the interaction was two-way, with God intervening directly on each occasion that it was necessary for the mind to influence the brain or vice versa.
All of this dualistic speculation came to a shuddering halt in 1949 with the publication of GilbertRyle’s classic Concept of Mind. Ryle abusively called Descartes’ theory the ‘dogma of the ghost in the machine’, and argued persuasively that Descartes had made a ‘category mistake’ by treating the mind as another ‘thing’ in the same category of things as the brain, rather than as something from another category altogether (a process, perhaps?)
Physicalism is the view that there is nothing in the world over and above the entities dealt with by physics. The next major theory of mind was physicalist: it was the Mind-BrainIdentity Theory propounded by J.J.C. Smart (an occasional PhilosophyNow contributor!) According to this, the mind is the same thing as the brain, and each state of your mind is equivalent to a corresponding state of your brain. This was followed by functionalism, another physicalist theory which argued that processes in the mind were identical to processes in the brain. (This opened up the theoretical possibility that conscious brains could be made out of something other than biological matter).
However, some philosophers began to argue that simply claiming that the mind and the brain were the same thing described in different ways left something important out of the picture, namely consciousness. There are a few famous arguments which crop up again and again in such discussions:
• What Is It Like To Be A Bat? In a famous paper of this name, Thomas Nagel argued that there is subjective experience which can’t be comprehended scientifically. We can find out how a bat’s body works but only a bat can know what it is actually like to be a bat.
• The Chinese Room: In John Searle’s influential thought experiment, a man sits in a room which has a slot in the wall. From time to time cards with symbols on them drop through the slot. The man doesn’t understand the symbols, but looks them up in a book of instructions and in accordance with what he reads, picks other cards, also with symbols on, which he pushes out through the slot. The symbols are in fact Chinese characters, and the man is effectively answering questions in Chinese, even though he doesn’t know it. Searle suggested this shows that even if we built a computer which sounded intelligent and answered all our questions convincingly, that wouldn’t mean that it knew what was going on.
• Zombies: Anti-physicalists claim that if the physicalist model was accurate, then we’d all be zombies. They mean that we’d be carrying out all our normal tasks and activities but that we’d all be devoid of any conscious experiences. Since (they say) we do have conscious experiences, physicalism must be wrong.
• The Hard Problem: David Chalmers said there are several different problems of consciousness, not just one. He draws a distinction between the easy problems (for instance understanding how integration and verbal report work) and the hard problem (understanding how we have subjective experience).
© 2004 Philosophy Now. All rights reserved.
This article contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of democracy, economic, environmental, human rights, political, scientific, and social justice issues, among others. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material in this article is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes.
Comments
I am open to the idea that mind and thus consciousness arise strictly from brain. Indeed, the idea is quite appealing to me, and I'm not absolutely committed to the idea that there has to be non-material stuff in their also, even from a religious perspective.
Still, it seems very unlikely that robots will in the forseeable future develop consciousness, because we do not make them to be conscious. It's like asking whether an electric drill will ever make gumbo. True, we imagine that we might want to make robots seem more and more like us, but a robot seeming human (for a human consciousness) is something completely different than things seeming for a robot. And "seeming for" or "being for" is what consciousness is.
Another problem is the element of intentionality in consciousness. In humans some stages of history and diferent kinds of people have differeing kinds and levels of intentionality. E.g. the modern moral perspective is a kind of intentionality that is completely absent in say, Homeric poetry. It is impossible to make another human adopt another kind of intentionality simply by manipulating them and their environment. You can even make a point about political freedom here. Intentionality in this sense seems to emerge rather than be created out of nothing. A fortier, it seems it would be impossible to "make" a robot conscious.
dende : You say, "we do not make (robots) to be conscious" but then you also say, "Intentionality seems to emerge rather than be created out of nothing." What if that gumbo-making electric drill was designed with sufficient complexity to allow it to learn from its own programs and recombine them to invent new gumbo recipes? A sort of Big Blue gumbo-making electric drill. And what if it was built to critique its own new recipes in such a way that seemed to us to denote a preference for some recipes over others? It is only because we are at present unable to create such a robot that we cannot say for sure whether some version of consciousness could not emerge from such a creation, regardless of our intentions for it. Not only do we lack the technology to build it, we also lack any criteria other than a human one with which to identify consciousness. If we could create such a robot, someone would have to write a book entitled "What Is It Like To Be A Robot?"
I like two things about alison's comment. 1. She thinks this is an empirical question, hence the comment about a lack of technology. She is saying we don't know until we've tried. Too many people try to give an a priori answer. 2. She points out the lack of criteria in defining what consciousness is.
I think it is funny that the author takes the "Zombie" argument and the "What its Like to be a Bat" article by Nagel to be the premier articles on subjective experience. Phenomenologists have been describing subjective experience in very detailed ways for decades now. Buddhists also have some very sophisticated things to say about subjective experience. It seems it would be a good idea to look to these traditions to find the criteria Alison is looking for.