title: Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds creator: Dennett, Daniel C. subject: Applied Cognitive Psychology subject: Robotics description: The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating according to the same well-understood principles that govern all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance. It may be wildly over-ambitious to suppose that human artificers can repeat Nature's triumph, with variations in material, form, and design process, but this is not a deep objection. It is not as if a conscious machine contradicted any fundamental laws of nature, the way a perpetual motion machine does. Still, many skeptics believe--or in any event want to believe--that it will never be done. I wouldn't wager against them, but my reasons for skepticism are mundane, economic reasons, not theoretical reasons. date: 1994 type: Preprint type: NonPeerReviewed format: text/html identifier: http://cogprints.org/429/1/concrobt.htm identifier: Dennett, Daniel C. (1994) Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds. [Preprint] relation: http://cogprints.org/429/