Stumbled onto this piece I wrote in 1994 for FringeWare Review, triggered by a meeting with Hans Moravec, as I recall.
Robotics has two sides — real-world practical application and development, and scifi mythopoetic phantasy construction — and like most real/surreal dichotomies of the Information Age, these two sides are blurred and indistinct within human consciousness, whatever that might be….
A good question in this context: What is consciousness? This is hard to answer because of the obvious blind spot inherent in self-definition (conscious process defining consciousness), you can’t see the forest for the trees or the neurons for the nerves, as the case may be. Because the “conscious” part of me is as deep as I usually go, or as I need to go in order to play the various survival games, I tend to confuse consciousness, an interface between the internal me and the external “thou,” as the totality of my being, as a real thing rather than a conveniently real-seeming process. (Then again, if consciousness defines reality, what’s real is what consciousness says is real, but that’s a digression….)
The sages tell me I’m delusional (attached to the delusion of samsara, of the world, in the Buddhist view), but I can’t quite figure out what this means. That’s because “I” am as much the noun, delusion, as the adjective, delusional. So much of what I am is filtered out, inaccessible to the ego-interface.
But wait. The delusional “I am” is a convenience that facilitates individual survival-stuff, so I’m not dissin’ it. The purpose of this rant is to make a point, not about ego or delusion (I’ll let the sages stew in those juices), but about robotics and AI research and the belief, often expressed in both scifi and real-world contexts, that you, or more precisely “your consciousness,” can be stored digitally. In most scifi depicitons of “consciousness in a box,” the object is immortality: you store what’s essentially you, and it “lives” forever, or until the plug’s pulled, whichever comes first (I know where I’m putting my money). In scifi, this is just another device for exploring the question of immortality, which has fascinated scifi authors and the mythmakers that preceded them as a way to come to terms with the death thing. Trying to rationalize the inescapable. But you find other optimistic folks (Hans Moravec, the Extropians) who are quite serious about the potential for immortality and who consider the consciousness-in-a-box scenario a viable means to that end.
I have a couple of problems with the scenario, myself, the first being that, even if you digitized your consciousness and stored it in a psychoelectronic device of some kind, it would not be you. Your awareness would still fold when you discorporate; the thing that’s stored might emulate your thinking or even your behavior, but it would be a simulacrum, like you but not you.
The other problem I have is best expressed in the form of a question: What are we storing? There seems to be a confusion between process and object. If consiousness is indeed only a shallow process handling the various negotiations between what we call subconscious and external reality, what is the character of the data you’re uploading and defining as you. Rules, implementations, stored memories — consciousness is really a hash consisting of no single, store-able entity. It’s like trying to package a tornado — what do you put in the package? Do you include all the chaotic elements of weather formation and all the applied physical rules that are manifest in the tornado’s brief life span as a process event?
The bottom line here is that you can’t really isolate a single entity “consciousness” and divorce it from its generative context.
Can you even simulate consciousness? Or intelligence, which probably has a clearer rule base than the vaguer concept of consciousness, but is still elusive. An “artificial” intelligence with sufficient density and complexity to mimic human consciousness is the very real goal of a particular thread of applied research, but so far no digital simulacrum has been constructed that “thinks” as we know thinking. The problem here resonates with the earlier argument about stored consciousness: we don’t have clarity about the definition and composition of human consciousness, so how can we copy it? It’s hard enough to copy something we know.
The mythic representations of scifi robots like Robbie or Gort or Hal9000 are like consciousness in a black box, deus-ex-machina stuff that might serve to carry a plot forward but, to those who punch code into dumb processors day after day, doesn’t ring any more true than a fairy tale or myth, which is to say that it’s more about wishes and fears than about any current or projected reality. It’s one thing to load a few rules, even with algorithms to simulate heuristic process, into the CPUs of this world, but it’s a real stretch to conceptualize silicon-based thinking or awareness.
Human and animal consciousness are products of code generations and modifications that reach `way back, perhaps to the inception of the universe, and are driven by an unfathomable creative force compared to which our efforts to construct artificial minds seem comparatively short-sighted and pitiful. Then again, I suppose in our efforts to mimic “the gods” we’re channeling that creative force, whatever its true origins, because it must be inherent in the coce structure of the human genome. And if that’s so, perhaps we’re destined to coevolve with our own creations, which have themselves evolved from basic practical and conceptual tools to today’s ubiquitous computing systems. This coevolution may produce cyborganic life forms which, though not created entirely by our hands, may be seen as products of an obsessive desire to be as we imagine gods to be, creatively self-perpetuating and therefore, as a race if not individually, immortal.
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