O no. They’re doing it again. There are people discussing whether or not the “Google car” is conscious. Apparently nobody stopped them short. It brings back good old memories about good old artificial intelligence, and all the moderner types (connectionism, Alife, behavior-based robotics, etc…).
So I was thinking, we can either answer this question from an ‘engineering’ perspective, or from a ‘philosophy of mind’ perspective. The philosophical answer I already know: the car will never be conscious, no matter how many special features it has. There’s simply too many hurdles to take. (Frame problem, symbol grounding problem, qualia problem, Chinese Room problems, Fodorian problems, the list goes on…). So let’s first look at the engineer’s point of view, because it seems a little bit more straightforward
Engineers will ask: what is the car’s performance? Can it do things? More specifically: can it do the *right things*. More specifically: Is it capable of doing whatever it is that you need to be able to do if you want to show that you’re sentient?
Here trouble starts already. If we have a good test measure, then we’re happy. Engineers can design a good test to find out whether the car meets its challenge, provided that the challenge is measurable.
So what do you need to be capable of if you should want to be conscious? We don’t want this question turn into a philosophical one of course, so we need to look at observable measurable behaviors. Do we have examples of conscious systems? What do they do, typically? Well, *we’re* conscious. So what do we do?
More problems. We do SO MANY THINGS. What is the relevant aspect of our behavior? What is the property of our behaviors that signals consciousness? Hard one to answer.
Let’s turn it around. What do systems do that are NOT conscious? Perhaps we can substract all of their regular behaviors from the set of our behaviors and see what’s left.
Rocks. For example. Rocks are not conscious. What do rocks do? Well, they sit still. They wear out and turn into sand. And they respond to gravitational forces in the Newtonian way (throw one and see).
We also sit still. So we shouldn’t take that as a sign of consciousness. And the fact that we turn to sand at some point (ashes to ashes) also should’t be of interest. And our response to gravity: not important. Right: we can cross of at least some from our list. Let’s see what’s left. Anywhere near the crash-test laboratory set-up?
Bummer. Still too many behaviors left potentially relevant for consciousness. And apart from rocks, I don’t know many other examples of systems of which I can safely say that they are definitely NOT conscious. Insects for example. Do I know for sure they are not conscious? I’ve read papers arguing for the consciousness of E.Coli bacteria. There are actually people (mainly in the 19-seventies though) telling me that the earth itself is somehow sentient, and that’s a rock!
I’m sorry. I cannot give the engineer any good definition of conscious behavior that he could use in a test. We’re thrown back into philosophy, even if we deliberately tried to avoid it.
Reflecting on this exercise I think perhaps the question “Is the Google Car conscious”, should be reinterpreted as aiming for something different altogether. Up until now, we’ve been discussing what would be a reasonable argument for or against the thesis that the car is conscious. Perhaps the whole idea of a reasonable argument is the problem. We’ve just found out that it is very difficult if not impossible to give reasonable arguments, simply because we have no clue what would count as conscious behavior and what not.
But we could also use the ‘case’ of the Google Car a different way. We could ask ourselves, on our gut-feeling: “Right from the hart, is the car conscious or not?”. Personally, I would say no. Perhaps you would say yes. We could either decide democratically (ask 1000 people). Or we could ask the most emininent professor in the room, provided s/he’s able to give us an skilled expert, gut-feeling answer (and not an argument based on reason).
Then, once we’ve decided first whether the car is conscious or not, we now have a different situation and a different engineering question to ask. Suppose, for example, we decide the car is conscious. We now have a system, completely open to us (since we’ve built it ourselves), and we know it’s conscious. So now the question becomes: what made it conscious? That is an interesting question. And in our attempt at answering it we actually might learn a lot about consciousness.
I think it is the sort of question cognitive science actually has been trying to answer all along, be it about consciousness, or memory, intelligence, emotion, or motor planning. It is a question that stems from creating a working hypothesis about a mechanic model (this model *has* quality A) and then doing the reverse engineering job of trying to find out what in the mechanics made it such that A is present.
It’s not really about the real thing though. It is a thoroughly pragmatic affair. We’ve first *decided* (based on no rational argument) that the model has A, and only given that hypothesis we analyse the system in the way we do. But I think it is a good way of doing science.
And quite designerly at that! Cowabonga!
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