CHAPTER
The evolution of machines
t WeLVe
MINDS AND MACHINES
Is there something special about human beings that enables us to think, see, hear,
feel, and fall in love; that gives us a desire to be good, a love of beauty, and a
longing for something beyond? Or are all these capacities just the products of a
complicated mechanism? In other words, am I just a machine?
Is there something about human-made machines that means they can never
think, feel, intuit, fall in love, and long for something beyond? Or could they one
day do all those things and more? In other words, could there be machine con-
sciousness (MC) or artificial consciousness (AC)?
If there could, we may have some kind of moral responsibility for our creations. We
may also find that their existence changes our views of our own consciousness.
MINDS LIKE MACHINES
The suspicion that we humans are really machines has a long history. The early
Greek materialists Leucippus, Democritus, and Lucretius, for example, argued that
there exist only atoms and the void, and everything happens through natural pro-
cesses. This mechanical view seemed to exclude divine creation and threaten free
will, and was rejected by Plato and Aristotle, who argued for worlds and forces
beyond the material world.
In the seventeenth century, Descartes argued that the human body was a
mechanism but that no mechanism alone was capable of speech and rational
‘work on machine
consciousness may
come strongly to affect
how consciousness is
seen’(Clowes, Torrance, and Chrisley,
2007, p. 14)