Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
is not refuted by events during the next half-century, I disagree with his
view that either is a necessary factor to support the existence of life. Why
should an entity need to be made of protein (or DNA), or to have a
metabolism, in order to be considered “alive”? Life, surely, is a function
of behaviour—what an entity does. Life is not a function of what the
entity is made of or how it acquires, converts and consumes energy.
Another argument often employed against the possibility of conscious-
ness in robots, is that robots could never have a qualitative experience in
the way we humans do, and that since qualitative experiences require
consciousness to help us experience them, the lack of qualitative experi-
ences in robots would imply a lack of consciousness. This particular argu-
ment can be refuted by what philosophers call the fading qualia thought
experiment. The refutation is based on considering the (hypothetical)
part-by-part replacement of each and every part of a human being by
man-made components. Let us imagine that we start by replacing the
neurons in a human's brain, one by one, with minute electronic devices,
nanotechnology, each electronic device successfully performing the task
of the neuron it replaced so that the human's performance is not impaired
in any way. Then, other bodily parts are removed from the human and
substituted by other man-made devices that replicate the functions of
the original components in the body. And so on, until eventually every
single component in the new version (a robot) is a nanomachine—the
robot's behaviour is controlled entirely by nanomachines. But its intelli-
gence, personality, creativity, sensory abilities and, most importantly, its
phenomenological perception, remain just as before. Then, clearly, one
of two possibilities must be true. Either
A. At some point during the sequence of replacement operations, the
being ceased to have qualitative experiences, losing its humanlike
characteristics. In this case, the replacement of a single neuron,
just one out of the one hundred billion neurons in the human
brain, could be responsible for the vanishing of the being's con-
scious experience—one neuron ago the being had consciousness
but one neuron later it did not;
or
B. The replacement being (the robot) possesses every single capability
and attribute of the original human, including consciousness.
If A is true, it would be possible to draw a line and state with absolute
certainty that after one particular replacement operation out of the bil-
