Why should one believe that conscious awareness is solely the result of organizational complexity? What is the connection between consciousness and combinatorics: transformation of quantity into quality? The claim that the former is reducible to the other seems unconvincing—as unlike as chalk and cheese! In his book1 Penrose is at least attempting to compare like with like: the enigma of consciousness with the progress of physics.

You are offered one billion dollars to 'simply' produce a proof-of-concept robot that has phenomenal consciousness -- in fact, you can receive a deliciously large portion of the money up front, by simply starting a three-year work plan in good faith. Should you take the money and commence? No. I explain why this refusal is in order, now and into the foreseeable future.

Zlatev offers surprisingly weak reasoning in support of his view that robots with the right kind of developmental histories can have meaning. We ought nonetheless to praise Zlatev for an impressionistic account of how attending to the psychology of human development can help us build robots that appear to have intentionality.

The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating according to the same well-understood principles that govern all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance. It may be wildly over-ambitious to suppose that human (...) artificers can repeat Nature's triumph, with variations in material, form, and design process, but this is not a deep objection. It is not as if a conscious machine contradicted any fundamental laws of nature, the way a perpetual motion machine does. Still, many skeptics believe--or in any event want to believe--that it will never be done. I wouldn't wager against them, but my reasons for skepticism are mundane, economic reasons, not theoretical reasons. (shrink)

Arguments about whether a robot could ever be conscious have been conducted up to now in the factually impoverished arena of what is possible "in principle." A team at MIT of which I am a part is now embarking on a longterm project to design and build a humanoid robot, Cog, whose cognitive talents will include speech, eye-coordinated manipulation of objects, and a host of self-protective, self-regulatory and self-exploring activities. The aim of the project is not to make a conscious (...) robot, but to make a robot that can interact with human beings in a robust and versatile manner in real time, take care of itself, and tell its designers things about itself that would otherwise be extremely difficult if not impossible to determine by examination. Many of the details of Cog's "neural" organization will parallel what is known (or presumed known) about their counterparts in the human brain, but the intended realism of Cog as a model is relatively coarse-grained, varying opportunistically as a function of what we think we know, what we think we can build, and what we think doesn't matter. Much of what we think will of course prove to be mistaken; that is one advantage of real experiments over thought experiments. (shrink)

A "machine" is any causal physical system, hence we are machines, hence machines can be conscious. The question is: which kinds of machines can be conscious? Chances are that robots that can pass the Turing Test -- completely indistinguishable from us in their behavioral capacities -- can be conscious (i.e. feel), but we can never be sure (because of the "other-minds" problem). And we can never know HOW they have minds, because of the "mind/body" problem. We can only know how (...) they pass the Turing Test, but not how, why or whether that makes them feel. (shrink)

Scepticism about the possibility of machine consciousness comes in at least two forms. Some argue that our neurobiology is special, and only something sharing our neurobiology could be a subject of experience. Others argue that a machine couldn't be anything else but a zombie: there could never be something it is like to be a machine. I advance a dynamic sensorimotor account of consciousness which argues against both these varieties of scepticism.

According to a common philosophical distinction, the `original' intentionality, or `aboutness' possessed by our thoughts, beliefs and desires, is categorically different from the `derived' intentionality manifested in some of our artifacts –- our words, books and pictures, for example. Those making the distinction claim that the intentionality of our artifacts is `parasitic' on the `genuine' intentionality to be found in members of the former class of things. In Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, Daniel Dennett criticizes that claim (...) and the distinction it rests on, and seeks to show that ``metaphysically original intentionality'' is illusory by working out the implications he sees in the practical possibility of a certain type of robot, i.e., one that generates `utterances' which are `inscrutable to the robot's designers' so that we, and they, must consult the robot to discover the meaning of its utterances. I argue that the implications Dennett finds are erroneous, regardless of whether such a robot is possible, and therefore that the real existence of metaphysically original intentionality has not been undermined by the possibility of the robot Dennett describes. (shrink)

Recent empirical work calls into question the so-called Simple View that an agent who A’s intentionally intends to A. In experimental studies, ordinary speakers frequently assent to claims that, in certain cases, agents who knowingly behave wrongly intentionally bring about the harm they do; yet the speakers tend to deny that it was the intention of those agents to cause the harm. This paper reports two additional studies that at first appear to support the original ones, but argues that in (...) fact, the evidence of all the studies considered is best understood in terms of the Simple View. (shrink)

In AI, consciousness of self consists in a program having certain kinds of facts about its own mental processes and state of mind. We discuss what consciousness of its own mental structures a robot will need in order to operate in the common sense world and accomplish the tasks humans will give it. It's quite a lot. Many features of human consciousness will be wanted, some will not, and some abilities not possessed by humans have already been found feasible and (...) useful in limited contexts. We give preliminary fragments of a logical language a robot can use to represent information about its own state of mind. A robot will often have to conclude that it cannot decide a question on the basis of the information in memory and therefore must seek information externally. Gödel's idea of relative consistency is used to formalize non-knowledge. Programs with the kind of consciousness discussed in this article do not yet exist, although programs with some components of it exist. Thinking about consciousness with a view to designing it provides a new approach to some of the problems of consciousness studied by philosophers. One advantage is that it focusses on the aspects of consciousness important for intelligent behavior. (shrink)

In this commentary, I discuss the three main articles in this volume that present survey data relevant to a search for something that might merit the label “the folk concept of intentional action” – the articles by Joshua Knobe and Arudra Burra, Bertram Malle, and Thomas Nadelhoffer. My guiding question is this: What shape might we find in an analysis of intentional action that takes at face value the results of all of the relevant surveys about vignettes discussed in these (...) three articles?1 To simplify exposition, I assume that there is something that merits the label I mentioned. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of the nature of know-how has focused on the relation between know-how and ability. Broadly speaking, neo-Ryleans attempt to identify know-how with a certain type of ability,1 while, traditionally, intellectualists attempt to reduce it to some form of propositional knowledge. For our purposes, however, this characterization of the debate is too crude. Instead, we prefer the following more explicit taxonomy. Anti-intellectualists, as we will use the term, maintain that knowing how to ? entails the ability to ?. Dispositionalists (...) maintain that the ability to ? is sufficient (modulo some fairly innocuous constraints) for knowing how to ?. Intellectualists, as we will use the term, deny the anti-intellectualist claim. Finally, radical intellectualists deny both the anti-intellectualist and dispositionalist claims. Pace neo-Ryleans (who in our taxonomy are those who accept both dispositionalism and anti-intellectualism), radical intellectualists maintain that the ability to ? is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowing how to ? (shrink)

Analytic philosophers have long used a priori methods to characterize folk concepts like knowledge, belief, and wrongness. Recently, researchers have begun to exploit social scientific methodologies to characterize such folk concepts. One line of work has explored folk intuitions on cases that are disputed within philosophy. A second approach, with potentially more radical implications, applies the methods of cross-cultural psychology to philosophical intuitions. Recent work suggests that people in different cultures have systematically different intuitions surrounding folk concepts like wrong, knows, (...) and refers. A third strand of research explores the emergence and character of folk concepts in children. These approaches to characterizing folk concepts provide important resources that will supplement, and perhaps sometimes displace, a priori approaches. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show why consciousness and thought are not manifested in digital computers. Analyzing the rationale for claiming that the formal manipulation of physical symbols in Turing machines would emulate human thought, the article attempts to show why this proved false. This is because the reinterpretation of designation and meaning to accommodate physical symbol manipulation eliminated their crucial functions in human discourse. Words have denotations and intensional meanings because the brain transforms the physical stimuli received (...) from the microworld into a qualitative, macroscopic representation for consciousness. Lacking this capacity as programmed machines, computers have no representations for their symbols to designate and mean. Unlike human beings in which consciousness and thought, with their inherent content, have emerged because of their organic natures, serial processing computers or parallel distributed processing systems, as programmed electrical machines, lack these causal capacities. (shrink)

One of the most important ongoing debates in the philosophy of mind is the debate over the reality of the first-person character of consciousness.[1] Philosophers on one side of this debate hold that some features of experience are accessible only from a first-person standpoint. Some members of this camp, notably Frank Jackson, have maintained that epiphenomenal properties play roles in consciousness [2]; others, notably John R. Searle, have rejected dualism and regarded mental phenomena as entirely biological.[3] In the opposite camp (...) are philosophers who hold that all mental capacities are in some sense computational - or, more broadly, explainable in terms of features of information processing systems.[4] Consistent with this explanatory agenda, members of this camp normally deny that any aspect of mind is accessible solely from a first-person standpoint. This denial sometimes goes very far - even as far as Dennett's claim that the phenomenology of conscious experience does not really exist. (shrink)

Oscar is going to be the first artificial person — at any rate, he is going to be the first artificial person to be built in Tucson's Philosophy Department. Oscar's creator, John Pollock, maintains that once Oscar is complete he will experience qualia, will be self-conscious, will have desires, fears, intentions, and a full range of mental states (Pollock 1989, pp. ix–x). In this paper I focus on what seems to me to be the most problematical of these claims, viz., (...) that Oscar will experience qualia. I argue that we have not been given sufficient reasons to believe this bold claim. I doubt that Oscar will enjoy qualitative conscious phenomena and I maintain that it will be like nothing to be Oscar. (shrink)

Current approaches to machine consciousness (MC) tend to offer a range of characteristic responses to critics of the enterprise. Many of these responses seem to marginalize phenomenal consciousness, by presupposing a 'thin' conception of phenomenality. This conception is, we will argue, largely shared by anti- computationalist critics of MC. On the thin conception, physiological or neural or functional or organizational features are secondary accompaniments to consciousness rather than primary components of consciousness itself. We outline an alternative, 'thick' conception of phenomenality. (...) This shows some signposts in the direction of a more adequate approach to MC. (shrink)