Robot ConsciousnessIn light of its behavior, and given what we know of its etiology, we might have good reason to
assert that Eimer does in fact have qualia. In other words, under suitable background conditions,
perhaps a behavioral would persuade us to attribute qualia to a programmed contrivance.
Searle here would object that if he implemented Eimer’s program himself he would find
nothing resembling the production of qualia. However, as Clark (2004) points out, we can run
the same type of thought experiment regarding the brain. In fact, Leibniz did just that. Blowing
brains up to any size you like and walking around in them, one finds nothing resembling the
production of qualia. But we know on independent grounds that brains do produce qualia
(unless Cartesian dualism is true). So perhaps merely knowing how a machine works at some
particular level of abstraction and not detecting qualia there does not justify denying that it is
subject to qualia. Indeed, the real lesson may be that so long as we remain ignorant of how brains
produce qualia, we cannot determine whether or not mechanical contrivances are capable of
producing them. Put differently, if Eimer says it has qualia but can’t fathom how, our response
cannot be, “We looked inside your head and didn’t see any, so there really are none.” With as
much justification, Eimer could say the same about us!
5 Stop Looking for QualiaThere are, on the other hand, those who would deny that Eimer has qualia on the simple
grounds that they do not exist anywhere. Even after centuries of trying, there still seems to be
no room for qualia in the mechanical world described by science. Particles (or waves or strings)
in motion are all there is. The rest is aggregations. If it is painfully hard to fathom how bits of
matter or energy could produce something as deeply mysterious as qualia, with properties that
seem non-mechanical, perhaps it is because there are no qualia. Perhaps qualiaphiles secretly
want humans to be special in some way and not mere machines. Or, to be more rigorous, perhaps
our puzzlement is not due to being subject to mysterious qualia but to a kind of psychologi-
cal illusion or cognitive defect, one arising from our distinctive way of processing information
(Dennett 1991; Tye 1999; Fiala et al. 2011). And get this: If Eimer works like we do, we would
expect it to be beset by the same psychopathology. So even if we produce robots like Eimer
that spontaneously claim to have qualia, qualiaphobes claim that they are not to be believed.
Neither are you.
6 Look Out for QualiaAnother response to the failure to find qualia in brains and robots would be to say that we are
looking (mostly) in the wrong place, for qualia typically have one foot outside of the head. Some
suggest that in order for any machine to have perceptual qualia it needs online, active control of
a body existing in tightly coupled interaction with a real environment (see Noë 2006). This is
not Galileo’s now-mundane notion that qualia are typically caused by body and world, but the
provocative thesis that they are constituted by cognition that is embodied and embedded (in the
world). No wonder, then, that Leibniz and Searle found no relevant qualia. They were looking
at just part of the relevant system.
Views of this sort seem on their face to be contradicted by fairly basic neurological consid-
erations about the location of qualia in humans. Dreams and the phantom limb experiences had
by amputees, both cited as evidence by Descartes (1647/1988), occur in the absence of any rel-
evant external objects, and they are now thought to result from the same sort of neural activity
that produces the corresponding veridical experiences. Or consider Penfield’s many striking case
studies of people who have vividly experienced bodily and worldly events, replete with sounds,