that you want to keep some in spite of the argu-
ments against them, and that with others you want
to go through the painful process of rooting them
out. Either way, the first step is to recognise them.
The story of ‘The Seventh Sally’ may help (Lem, 1981;
see Activity 12.2). Has Trurl just made an amusing
model world or has he committed a terrible crime?
Turing (1950) lists nine opinions opposed to his own
view that machines can think, and some of these
are equally applicable to consciousness. Dennett
(1995d) and Chalmers (1996) each list four argu-
ments for the impossibility of a conscious robot, and
there are many other such lists. Here are some of
the main objections to the possibility of conscious
machines.
SOULS, SPIRITS, AND SEPARATE MINDS
Consciousness is the unique capacity of the
human soul which is given by God to us alone.
God would not give a soul to a human-made
machine, so machines can never be conscious.Or you might prefer a nonreligious version of
dualism:
Consciousness is the unique capacity the
nonphysical mind. We cannot give a separate
non-physical mind to a machine, so machines
can never be conscious.Turing strongly disagrees with this argument, and his
response is that the builders of thinking machines
would not be usurping God’s power of creating souls
any more than people who have children do: that
the builders could be thought of as ‘instruments of
His will providing mansions for the souls that He cre-
ates’ (1950, p. 443). The secular equivalent to Turing’s
riposte would be that if you built the right machine
it would automatically attract or create a nonphysi-
cal conscious mind to go with it.
If you incline towards the dualist argument in spite
of all its difficulties, you might ask yourself the fol-
lowing question. Suppose that one day you meet
a truly remarkable machine. It chats to you happily
about the weather and your job. It is wonderfully
sympathetic when you find yourself pouring out all
your emotional troubles. It explains to you, as well as
it can, what it feels like to be a machine, and makes
ACtIVItY 12.2
‘The Seventh Sally’ or How
Trurl’s perfection led to
no good‘The Seventh Sally’ is a story from The Cyberiad by the
Polish writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem, reprinted
with a commentary in Hofstadter and Dennett (1981).
We recommend you read the whole story, but here is
a brief outline.
Trurl, a brilliant (almost godlike) robotic engineer, or
‘constructor’, who was well known for his good deeds,
wanted to prevent a wicked king from oppressing his
poor subjects. So he created an entirely new kingdom
for the king. It was full of towns, rivers, mountains,
and forests. It had armies, citadels, market places,
winter palaces, summer villas, and magnificent steeds,
and he ‘threw in the necessary handful of traitors,
another of heroes, added a pinch of prophets and
seers, and one messiah and one great poet each, after
which he bent over and set the works in motion’.
There were star-gazing astronomers and noisy children,
‘And all of this, connected, mounted and ground to
precision, fit into a box, and not a very large box, but
just the size that could be carried about with ease’.
Trurl presented this box to the king, explaining how
to work the controls to make proclamations, program
wars, or quell rebellions. The king immediately
declared a state of emergency, martial law, a curfew,
and a special levy.
After a year had passed (which was hardly a minute
for Trurl and the king) the king magnanimously
abolished one death penalty, lightened the levy,
and annulled the state of emergency, ‘whereupon a
tumultuous cry of gratitude, like the squeaking of tiny
mice lifted by their tails, rose up from the box’. Trurl
returned home, proud of having made the king happy
while saving his real subjects from appalling tyranny.
To his surprise, Trurl’s friend was not pleased, but was
horrified that Trurl gave the brutal despot a whole
civilisation to rule over. But it’s only a model, protested
Trurl:
all these processes only take place because
I programmed them, and so they aren’t