look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the
simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality,
endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What
happens when those senses go dark, but the model –
thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor – fails to
refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete
rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data
in a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial?
How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no
longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind?(Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006, p. 193)Some other examples of theory-led robotics might include
Giulio Tononi’s (2015) integrated information theory (if you
build integration into a machine in ways that increase Φ, the cor-
responding degree of consciousness should follow) or Michael
Graziano’s attention schema theory (if a system can model its
own attention, it can lay claim to consciousness) (Webb and
Graziano, 2015).
According to quantum theories, none of these implementations
would produce real consciousness because that needs quantum processes. For
example, in Penrose and Hameroff ’s version, consciousness emerges from quan-
tum coherence in the microtubules, so one would need to build a quantum com-
puter that achieved this kind of integration across its system. One might then
conclude that it was really conscious.
None of this avoids the two big problems mentioned at the start of this section.
First, we do not know what consciousness is. Each of these theories (and many
others) says something about what consciousness is or what it emerges from, but
if the appropriate machine were built, critics could still argue that this particular
theory was wrong and therefore the machine was not conscious after all. Second,
we have no test for proving whether a machine is conscious or not, so even if
one of these machines claimed to be conscious, stayed awake all night worrying
about consciousness, and passed the Turing test, we could still not convince scep-
tics that it was really conscious, even though we might have learned a lot from the
machine.DELUDED MACHINES
There is a completely different way of thinking about X. Perhaps consciousness
is not what it seems to be, and we are in some fundamental way deluded about
the nature of consciousness. According to this view, we may believe we are con-
scious observers, experiencing a continuous stream of contents passing through
our conscious minds, but we are wrong because there is no Cartesian Theatre,
no audience, no ‘actual phenomenology’, and no continuous stream of conscious
experiences (Dennett, 1991; Blackmore, 2002, 2012). We humans certainly seem
to be conscious, and that requires explaining, but the right kind of explanation‘Engineering will step
from the mere design of
complex artefacts to the
design of subjects’
(Chella and Manzotti, 2007,
p. 11)
FIGURE 12.13 • CRONOS is a strongly embodied
anthropomimetic upper-body
robot, with human-like elastic
muscles and tendons, and bone-
like skeleton.FIGURE 12.14 • The large square represents
the agent, and the large circle
the world. The thought bubbles
represent the agent’s internal
models of itself and the world,
which are separate but which
interact to give functionally useful
predictions of the effects of
possible actions (after Holland,
2007).