Reading through old Dennettalia, I stumbled on this:
Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds
(3) Robots are artifacts, and consciousness abhors an artifact; only something natural, born not manufactured, could exhibit genuine consciousness.
…
If consciousness abhors an artifact, it cannot be because being born gives a complex of cells a property (aside from that historic property itself) that it could not otherwise have “in principle”. There might, however, be a question of practicality. We have just seen how, as a matter of exigent practicality, it could turn out after all that organic materials were needed to make a conscious robot. For similar reasons, it could turn out that any conscious robot had to be, if not born, at least the beneficiary of a longish period of infancy. Making a fully-equipped conscious adult robot might just be too much work. It might be vastly easier to make an initially unconscious or nonconscious “infant” robot and let it “grow up” into consciousness, more or less the way we all do. This hunch is not the disreputable claim that a certain sort of historic process puts a mystic stamp of approval on its product, but the more interesting and plausible claim that a certain sort of process is the only practical way of designing all the things that need designing in a conscious being.
Such a claim is entirely reasonable.
Dennett goes on to argue that this claim is reasonable, because it is a specific case of the more general claim:
(4) Robots will always just be much too simple to be conscious.
Dennett compares the possibility of building a conscious artifact to the possibility of creating an animation that is indistinguishable from real video.
I suggest that Dennett simultaneously overvalues the sophistication of conscious processes, and underestimates the progress of our technological simulations. In fact, the core of my project is to argue that such a skeptical view of our technological capabilities is eminently unreasonable. But I wont give that argument here.
Thoughts?
Dennett’s wrong, you’re right; I’m not sucking up because I want your help, it’s just a coincidence that I agree with you… 😉
Not to mention, but wasn’t (or “isn’t” the better term?) a similar argument used to explain why we could never combine DNA in the lab to make life?
You’re both half right. Dennett’s right to make a big deal out of consciousness, because it really is an essential part of making ‘minds like ours.’ I know you don’t necessarily think this is a laudable goal–and you may be right–but the fact of the matter is that it IS a goal for many, and thus it is a problem that need to be explored. However, I don’t think that Dennett’s right in saying that it is _in principle_ impossible to create a conscious artifact; given enough resources, it would be entirely possible to construct an exact replica of the human brain with artificial materials, which seems to me to count as an artifact. Unless Dennett wants to deny that consciousness is the result of physical structure (which he doesn’t), I don’t really see how he can make that claim. The technology to actually do this is a long way off still (and it won’t happen with digital computers; the Chinese Room shows that clearly, I think), but it’s far from the realm of possibility.
The claim that we’ll never create photorealistic animations is pretty laughable; that, I think, will happen within 5-10 years (apparently Dennett hasn’t sat down with a PS3 lately).
i know that this thread is probably dead, but i stumbled across it while looking for the origin of that “consciousness abhors an artifact” quotation and just had to respond. couldn’t help myself!
the dennett quotation you referred to was part of a symposium lecture that he gave in which he presented and then refuted a series of objections to the possibility that artificial minds could be conscious. after presenting this “complexity argument” in its strongest form, dennett concludes that “it is simply irrelevant to the important theoretical issues.” dennett’s position in this talk–as well as throughout the body of his work–is that it is theoretically possible to develop and artificial consciousness.
additionally, in the second part of his talk, he discusses his involvement with the cog project–an mit ai lab project that is attempting ultimately to develop artificial consciousness. dennett is the resident cognitive philosopher on the project.
here is one link to the full text of the presentation if you want to check it out for yourself: http://www.people.ku.edu/~mvitevit/Dennett_HumanRobotMinds.pdf.