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 […]