Ray Kurzweil - How to Create a Mind - The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

The reality is that these theories are all leaps of faith, and I would add that where consciousness is concerned, the guiding principle is “you gotta have faith”—that is, we each need a leap of faith as to what and who is conscious, and who and what we are as conscious beings. Otherwise we could not get up in the morning. But we should be honest about the fundamental need for a leap of faith in this matter and self-reflective as to what our own particular leap involves.

People have very different leaps, despite impressions to the contrary. Individual philosophical assumptions about the nature and source of consciousness underlie disagreements on issues ranging from animal rights to abortion, and will result in even more contentious future conflicts over machine rights. My objective prediction is that machines in the future will appear to be conscious and that they will be convincing to biological people when they speak of their qualia. They will exhibit the full range of subtle, familiar emotional cues; they will make us laugh and cry; and they will get mad at us if we say that we don’t believe that they are conscious. (They will be very smart, so we won’t want that to happen.) We will come to accept that they are conscious persons. My own leap of faith is this: Once machines do succeed in being convincing when they speak of their qualia and conscious experiences, they will indeed constitute conscious persons. I have come to my position via this thought experiment: Imagine that you meet an entity in the future (a robot or an avatar) that is completely convincing in her emotional reactions. She laughs convincingly at your jokes, and in turn makes you laugh and cry (but not just by pinching you). She convinces you of her sincerity when she speaks of her fears and longings. In every way, she seems conscious. She seems, in fact, like a person. Would you accept her as a conscious person?

If your initial reaction is that you would likely detect some way in which she betrays her nonbiological nature, then you are not keeping to the assumptions in this hypothetical situation, which established that she is fully convincing. Given that assumption, if she were threatened with destruction and responded, as a human would, with terror, would you react in the same empathetic way that you would if you witnessed such a scene involving a human? For myself, the answer is yes, and I believe the answer would be the same for most if not virtually all other people regardless of what they might assert now in a philosophical debate. Again, the emphasis here is on the word “convincing.”

There is certainly disagreement on when or even whether we will encounter such a nonbiological entity. My own consistent prediction is that this will first take place in 2029 and become routine in the 2030s. But putting the time frame aside, I believe that we will eventually come to regard such entities as conscious. Consider how we already treat them when we are exposed to them as characters in stories and movies: R2D2 from the Star Wars movies, David and Teddy from the movie A.I ., Data from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation , Johnny 5 from the movie Short Circuit , WALL-E from Disney’s movie Wall-E , T-800—the (good) Terminator—in the second and later Terminator movies, Rachael the Replicant from the movie Blade Runner (who, by the way, is not aware that she is not human), Bumblebee from the movie, TV, and comic series Transformers , and Sonny from the movie I, Robot . We do empathize with these characters even though we know that they are nonbiological. We regard them as conscious persons, just as we do biological human characters. We share their feelings and fear for them when they get into trouble. If that is how we treat fictional nonbiological characters today, then that is how we will treat real-life intelligences in the future that don’t happen to have a biological substrate.

If you do accept the leap of faith that a nonbiological entity that is convincing in its reactions to qualia is actually conscious, then consider what that implies: namely that consciousness is an emergent property of the overall pattern of an entity, not the substrate it runs on.

There is a conceptual gap between science, which stands for objective measurement and the conclusions we can draw thereby, and consciousness, which is a synonym for subjective experience. We obviously cannot simply ask an entity in question, “Are you conscious?” If we look inside its “head,” biological or otherwise, to ascertain that, then we would have to make philosophical assumptions in determining what it is that we are looking for. The question as to whether or not an entity is conscious is therefore not a scientific one. Based on this, some observers go on to question whether consciousness itself has any basis in reality. English writer and philosopher Susan Blackmore (born in 1951) speaks of the “grand illusion of consciousness.” She acknowledges the reality of the meme (idea) of consciousness—in other words, consciousness certainly exists as an idea, and there are a great many neocortical structures that deal with the idea, not to mention words that have been spoken and written about it. But it is not clear that it refers to something real. Blackburn goes on to explain that she is not necessarily denying the reality of consciousness, but rather attempting to articulate the sorts of dilemmas we encounter when we try to pin down the concept. As British psychologist and writer Stuart Sutherland (1927–1998) wrote in the International Dictionary of Psychol ogy, “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved.” 4

However, we would be well advised not to dismiss the concept too easily as just a polite debate between philosophers—which, incidentally, dates back two thousand years to the Platonic dialogues. The idea of consciousness underlies our moral system, and our legal system in turn is loosely built on those moral beliefs. If a person extinguishes someone’s consciousness, as in the act of murder, we consider that to be immoral, and with some exceptions, a high crime. Those exceptions are also relevant to consciousness, in that we might authorize police or military forces to kill certain conscious people to protect a greater number of other conscious people. We can debate the merits of particular exceptions, but the underlying principle holds true.

Assaulting someone and causing her to experience suffering is also generally considered immoral and illegal. If I destroy my property, it is probably acceptable. If I destroy your property without your permission, it is probably not acceptable, but not because I am causing suffering to your property, but rather to you as the owner of the property. On the other hand, if my property includes a conscious being such as an animal, then I as the owner of that animal do not necessarily have free moral or legal rein to do with it as I wish—there are, for example, laws against animal cruelty.

Because a great deal of our moral and legal system is based on protecting the existence of and preventing the unnecessary suffering of conscious entities, in order to make responsible judgments we need to answer the question as to who is conscious. That question is therefore not simply a matter for intellectual debate, as is evident in the controversy surrounding an issue like abortion. I should point out that the abortion issue can go somewhat beyond the issue of consciousness, as pro-life proponents argue that the potential for an embryo to ultimately become a conscious person is sufficient reason for it to be awarded protection, just as someone in a coma deserves that right. But fundamentally the issue is a debate about when a fetus becomes conscious.