The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness

Jonathan Waskan

In the same way, the worlds thought about by our synthetic descendants might range across
possibilities far beyond anything our feeble brains are fit to envision. Add to this that we are wit-
nessing the creation of computers that operate on the basis of ‘spooky’ quantum principles such
as entanglement and superposition. When perfected, they will quite literally do things in hours
that no von Neumann device could accomplish in a thousand years. In short, our synthetic
progeny may find that there is far, far less closed to them than there is to us. This, in any case, is
the picture that emerges when you sic Kurzweil on Jackson and McGinn.
The moral and practical considerations of such an eventuality are too numerous to men-
tion. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, puts the direst possibility succinctly: By creating
such devices we are summoning the demon that will destroy us. No wonder he is trying to escape
to Mars!

9 What If (for Us) It’s All Synthetic?

Let me close with an even more exotic possibility. It could be that the answer to whether or not
synthetic contrivances are capable of possessing qualia is an emphatic yes, for we are such con-
trivances. As Nick Bostrom (2003) has argued, if we extrapolate out, we find that (assuming we
survive) our insatiable drive to create sophisticated computer models of the world will bring
about a future brimming with massive, high-fidelity models of past events, events such as are
now transpiring...or so we think. After all, says Bostrom, as a matter of simple probability, given
the number of worlds we might be living in (i.e., the one real world plus the innumerable future
virtual worlds) the chances are overwhelming that the future has already arrived and that we are
conscious synthetic agents living out our paltry lives in a computer simulation. Indeed, for all
we know, the mystery of qualia may have long since been solved by humanity’s super-intelligent
robotic descendants and all of this discussion is, well, just academic.

Notes

1 The Star Trek: Next Generation episode ‘Sentient Being’ provides an entertaining debate on this topic.
2 http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/neurosynaptic-chips.shtml (last accessed 3/3/17).
3 For further discussion see Waskan (2011).
4 This approach does not require the controversial assumption that all conscious experiences (e.g., mel-
ancholy) have representational content. The central claim is that qualia are high-level happenings, rep-
resentational or not.
5 Plausibly high-level representational (or other) processes must also be used, or poised for use, by other
systems involved in attention, memory, reasoning, planning, motion guidance, and the like (Tye 2000;
also see Rosenthal 1986).
6 See http://www.iep.utm.edu/connect/ (last accessed 3/6/17).
7 If it turns out that qualia are ineluctably biological, synthetic beings (who have none) might still take
our testimony as evidence that qualia exist, or at least that we think they do, and go about trying to
explain our attestations.

References

Bechtel, W., and Abrahamsen, A. (2002) Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in
Networks (2nd ed.), Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Boden, M. (2006) Mind as Machine, New York: Oxford University Press.
Bostrom, N. (2003) “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53: 243–255.
Brown, T. (2003) Making Truth: Metaphor in Science, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Clark, A. (2004) Mindware, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. (1991) Consciousness Explained, New York: Little, Brown, and Company.