- seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
genuine... [.. .] these births, loves, acts
of heroism, and denunciations are nothing
but the minuscule capering of electrons in
space, precisely arranged by the skill of my
nonlinear craft.
His friend would have none of it. The size of the tiny
people is immaterial, he said, ‘And don’t they suffer,
don’t they know the burden of labor, don’t they die?
[.. .] And if I were to look inside your head, I would
also see nothing but electrons’. Trurl, he says, has
committed a terrible crime. He has not just imitated
suffering, as he intended, but has created it.
What do you think?For a group discussion
This story can provoke heated and insightful
disagreements. Ask everyone to read the story in
advance and to write down their answer to the
question ‘Has Trurl committed a terrible crime?’: ‘Yes’
or ‘No’. Check that they have done so, or ask for a
vote.
Ask for two volunteers with strong opinions, one to
defend Trurl, the other to accuse him of cruelty. This
works best if the participants really believe in their
respective roles. Others can ask questions and then
vote. Has anyone changed their mind? If so, why? Is
there any way of finding out who is right?you laugh with funny stories about humans. Now what do you
conclude?
1 the machine is a zombie (with all the familiar problems that
entails)
2 God saw fit to give this wonderful machine a soul or, if you
prefer, the machine had attracted or created a separate mind
3 you were wrong, and a machine can be conscious.This is a good thought experiment for winkling out implicit
assumptions and strongly held intuitions. Turing suggests that
fear and a desire for human superiority motivate the theolog-
ical objection and also what he calls the ‘Heads in the Sand’
objection: ‘The consequences of machines thinking would be
too dreadful. Let us hope and believe that they cannot do so’
(1950, p. 444). Some people may similarly fear the possibility of
a machine being conscious.THE IMPORTANCE OF BIOLOGY
Only living, biological creatures can be conscious, therefore
a machine, which is manufactured and non-biological,
cannot be.
At its simplest, this argument is mere dogmatic assertion, or an
appeal to vitalism. Yet it might be valid if there were shown to
be relevant differences between living and non-living things.
For example, it might turn out that only protein membranes
just like those in real neurons can integrate enough informa-
tion, quickly enough and in a small enough space, to make a
conscious machine possible, or that only the neurotransmitters
dopamine and serotonin can sustain the subtlety of emo-
tional response needed for consciousness. But in this case,
robot-builders would probably make use of these chemicals, over-
coming the objection by blurring the distinction between natural
and artificial machines. There are already robots that feed on flies and
slugs, and people who have heart valves, cochlear implants, pros-
thetic limbs, and ‘neuroprostheses’, so this is far from science fiction.A second argument is that biological creatures grow and learn over a
long period before they become conscious; machines have no history
and so cannot be conscious. This has some force if you think only of
machines made in factories and pumped out ready to go, but per-
haps the best (or only) way to make effective robots is to give them
time to learn in a real environment. It is clear from connectionism,
embodied cognition, and situated and swarm robotics that such peri-
ods of environmentally embedded learning may well be necessary.
Searle (1992) claims that ‘brains cause minds’, and that there is some-
thing special about biology. His theory of ‘biological naturalism’
seems to imply that brains and minds must be distinct from each‘Brains cause minds’
(Searle, 1984, p. 39)
FIGURE 12.9 • Cog, MIT’s upper-body anthropomimetic robot,
interacting with its technician.