Word: cog
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...wait a second. Human beings have, in addition to the physical data flow representing the heat, one other thing: a feeling of heat and pain, subjective experience, consciousness. Why do they? According to Chalmers, studying Cog doesn't answer that question but deepens it. For the moral of Cog's story seems to be that you don't, in principle, need pain to function like a human being. After all, the reflexive withdrawal of Cog's hand is entirely explicable in terms of physical data flow, electrons coercing Cog into recoiling. There's no apparent role for subjective experience...
...course, it's always possible that Cog does have a kind of consciousness--a consideration that neither Dennett nor Chalmers rules out. But even then the mystery would persist, for you could still account for all the behavior by talking about physical processes, without ever mentioning feelings. And so too with humans. This, says Chalmers, is the mystery of the "extraness" of consciousness. And it is crystallized, not resolved, by advances in artificial intelligence. Because however human machines become--however deftly they someday pass the Turing test, however precisely their data flow mirrors the brain's data flow--everything they...
...hard" questions about consciousness--the extraness question and the water-into-wine question--don't depend on artificial intelligence. They could occur (and have occurred) to people who simply take the mind-as-machine idea seriously and ponder its implications. But the actual construction of a robot like Cog, or of a pandemonium machine, makes the hard questions more vivid. Materialist dismissals of the mind-body problem may seem forceful on paper, but, says McGinn, "you start to see the limits of a concept once it gets realized." With AI, the tenets of strict materialism are being realized--and found...
...this view, Cog may indeed have consciousness. So might a pandemonium machine. So might a thermostat. Chalmers thinks it quite possible that AI research may someday generate--may now be generating--new spheres of consciousness unsensed by the rest of us. Strange as it may seem, the prospect that we are creating a new species of sentient life is now being taken seriously in philosophy...
RODNEY BROOKS GUSHES LIKE A first-time parent about the things his baby can do. "It sits there waving its arm around, watching its arm, reaching for things," he says. These are pretty standard tricks for newborn humans, of course, but then Brooks' "baby" (nicknamed Cog) isn't exactly human. It's a vaguely person-shaped concoction of metal, plastic and silicon, with cameras where its eyes should be and eight 32-bit microprocessors for a brain. Cog is an artificially intelligent computer that is trying to learn about the world the way babies do, programming and reprogramming itself through...