Friday, July 27, 2007
Quite a spread on robots in the Times Magazine
I think they're a little confused about consciousness, however. They seem to regard a sufficiently intelligent robot as having consciousness, because it can sort of emulate a human. The true measure of consciousness, of course, is whether the thing has an existence of its own - whether there's something in it's head, so to speak. A society of very cleverly constructed machines wouldn't be conscious. Just clever. I suppose to the materialist, however, his own consciousness is evidence enough that it emerges spontaneously from nature, therefore it's only a matter of time before we have a robot rights movement and you have to let people and robots get it on.
