- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
increasingly sophisticated barriers letting some kinds of information in and
rejecting other kinds. If they began using self-reference, then other memes could
take advantage of this, elaborating their concepts of self. They would be much
like selfplexes: the same things we create when we use language that refers to
self.
We should expect a future in which increasing numbers of artificial personalities
communicate routinely with us, answering the phone, dealing with our banking
and shopping, and helping us find the information we want. They will probably
be increasingly difficult to distinguish from what we now call real people, and as
we saw in Chapter 12, we will respond to them as though they are.
To some people, ‘the presence or absence of phenomenal consciousness can
never be more than a matter of attribution’ (Franklin, 2003, p. 64). Stan Franklin
predicts that future software agents and robots will be so capable that people will
simply assume they are conscious. Then ‘The issue of machine consciousness will
no longer be relevant’ (p. 64).
When this happens and these beings claim to be as conscious as you are, will you
believe them?
The idea of self links up with every other topic we have considered in this book. It
is integral to why we think there is a problem of consciousness in the first place.
It seems to provide a subject for the feeling of what-it’s-like-to-be . . . It is the
entity that declares it couldn’t be under an illusion about something as dear to it
as its own experiences. It is what feels as though it resides in your brain, or at least
somewhere in your head, whether in a comfy seat in your own private theatre or
just in the sense you have that there is unity, all the time, with you at its centre.
It is ‘you’ who pays attention, decides to act, and disappears in unconsciousness.
It is you for whom consciousness must have evolved, and you who is convinced
that being an octopus is not like being you, and that being a machine is like being
nothing at all, let alone like being like you. You are the one who chooses – or not –
to expand your mind with drugs or meditation, or to lose yourself and briefly be
someone else in a story or a film. It is you who seems to be only half-present in
dreaming, and lost to view in mental illness.
Is it?
Do you feel any differently about any of this now, having read this far?
Does the you who might feel differently feel any less solid?‘The self posits itself, and
by virtue of this mere
self-assertion it exists’
(Fichte, 1794–1795/1982,
trans. Heath and Lachs, p. 97)
Broks, P. (2003). To be two or not to be. In P. Broks,
Into the silent land: Travels in neuropsychology (pp.
204–225). London: Atlantic.A routine teleportation to Mars fails to vaporise the
original traveller on departure, contravening the Prolif-
eration of Persons Act.READING