Consciousness

• seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
  can assess the current situation and take evasive
  action. This approach is sometimes called situ-
  ated robotics, or behaviour-based (as opposed to
  knowledge-based) robotics.
  One implication is that intelligent behaviours can
  emerge from simple systems, perhaps holding
  out the hope that consciousness might do the
  same. There are many examples of such emer-
  gence in biology. For example, termites build
  extraordinary structures that look as though they
  must be planned, when in fact they emerge from
  simple rules about when to add or remove mud,
  embodied in the individual termites. Emergent
  intelligence in social insects is the inspiration
  behind the field of swarm robotics (Brambilla
  et al., 2013), in which large numbers of simple
  robots following relatively simple rules can
  produce multiple complex swarm behaviours,
  whether for use in medicine, disaster rescue, or autonomous warfare.
  As for single robots – imagine watching a small wheeled robot moving along next
  to a wall. It does not bump the wall or wander far away from it, but just wiggles
  along, reliably following the bends and turning the corners. How? It might have
  been programmed to follow the wall using a detailed internal representation of
  the area and instructions for coping with each eventuality, but in fact it need not
  be. All it needs is a tendency to veer to the right, and a sensor on the right side to
  detect close objects and make it turn slightly to the left whenever it does so. By
  balancing the two tendencies, wall-following behaviour emerges.
  This is a good example of that slippery concept, an emergent property. An appar-
  ently intelligent behaviour has emerged from an extremely simple system. This
  might help us to consider whether consciousness could also be an emergent
  property of a physical system, as some believe it is (Humphrey, 1987; Mithen,
  1996; Searle, 1997; Feinberg and Mallatt, 2016).

INTELLIGENCE WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

Traditional AI assumed that intelligence is all about manipulating representa-

tions, yet our wall-following robot managed with none. How much further could

this go? To find out, Rodney Brooks and his colleagues at MIT spent many years

building robots with no internal representations (Brooks, 1997, 2002).

Brooks’s ‘creatures’ can wander about in complex environments such as offices

or labs full of people and carry out tasks such as collecting rubbish. They have

several control layers, each carrying out a simple task in response to the envi-

ronment. These are built on top of each other as needed and have limited

connections enabling one layer to suppress or inhibit another. This is referred

to as ‘subsumption architecture’ because one layer can subsume the activity of

another. Brooks’s robot Allen, for example, had three layers: the lowest prevented

him from touching other objects by making him run away from obstructions but

FIGURE 12.4 • A termite mound in West Bengal,
India. Each individual termite
follows simple rules about when
to add mud and when to remove
it. None has a plan of the overall
mound, yet the complex system
of tunnels and walls emerges.
Is consciousness an emergent
phenomenon like this?