creators_name: Dennett, Daniel C.
type: preprint
datestamp: 1998-03-22
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:53:54
metadata_visibility: show
title: Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds
subjects: appl-cog-psy
subjects: comp-sci-robot
full_text_status: public
abstract: 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
date_type: published
refereed: FALSE
citation:   Dennett, Daniel C.  (1994) Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds.  [Preprint]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/429/1/concrobt.htm