If we step outside biology, nonbiological intelligence will be even more varied than intelligence in the biological world. For example, some entities may not have a fear of their own destruction, and may not have a need for the emotions we see in humans or in any biological creature. Perhaps they could still pass the Turing test, or perhaps they wouldn’t even be willing to try.
We do in fact build robots today that do not have a sense of self-preservation to carry out missions in dangerous environments. They’re not sufficiently intelligent or complex yet for us to seriously consider their sentience, but we can imagine future robots of this sort that are as complex as humans. What about them?
Personally I would say that if I saw in such a device’s behavior a commitment to a complex and worthy goal and the ability to execute notable decisions and actions to carry out its mission, I would be impressed and probably become upset if it got destroyed. This is now perhaps stretching the concept a bit, in that I am responding to behavior that does not include many emotions we consider universal in people and even in biological creatures of all kinds. But again, I am seeking to connect with attributes that I can relate to in myself and other people. The idea of an entity totally dedicated to a noble goal and carrying it out or at least attempting to do so without regard for its own well-being is, after all, not completely foreign to human experience. In this instance we are also considering an entity that is seeking to protect biological humans or in some way advance our agenda.
What if this entity has its own goals distinct from a human one and is not carrying out a mission we would recognize as noble in our own terms? I might then attempt to see if I could connect or appreciate some of its abilities in some other way. If it is indeed very intelligent, it is likely to be good at math, so perhaps I could have a conversation with it on that topic. Maybe it would appreciate math jokes.
But if the entity has no interest in communicating with me, and I don’t have sufficient access to its actions and decision making to be moved by the beauty of its internal processes, does that mean that it is not conscious? I need to conclude that entities that do not succeed in convincing me of their emotional reactions, or that don’t care to try, are not necessarily not conscious. It would be difficult to recognize another conscious entity without establishing some level of empathetic communication, but that judgment reflects my own limitations more than it does the entity under consideration. We thus need to proceed with humility. It is challenging enough to put ourselves in the subjective shoes of another human, so the task will be that much harder with intelligences that are extremely different from our own.
What Are We Conscious Of?
If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.
Returning to the giant squid, we can recognize some of its apparent emotions, but much of its behavior is a mystery. What is it like being a giant squid? How does it feel as it squeezes its spineless body through a tiny opening? We don’t even have the vocabulary to answer this question, given that we cannot even describe experiences that we do share with other people, such as seeing the color red or feeling water splash on our bodies.
But we don’t have to go as far as the bottom of the ocean to find mysteries in the nature of conscious experiences—we need only consider our own. I know, for example, that I am conscious. I assume that you, the reader, are conscious also. (As for people who have not bought my book, I am not so sure.) But what am I conscious of? You might ask yourself the same question.
Try this thought experiment (which will work for those of you who drive a car): Imagine that you are driving in the left lane of a highway. Now close your eyes, grab an imagined steering wheel, and make the movements to change lanes to the lane to your right.
Okay, before continuing to read, try it.
Here is what you probably did: You held the steering wheel. You checked that the right lane is clear. Assuming the lane was clear, you turned the steering wheel to the right for a brief period. Then you straightened it out again. Job done.
It’s a good thing you weren’t in a real car, because you just zoomed across all the lanes of the highway and crashed into a tree. While I probably should have mentioned that you shouldn’t try this in a real moving car (but then I assume you have already mastered the rule that you shouldn’t drive with your eyes closed), that’s not really the key problem here. If you used the procedure I just described—and almost everyone does when doing this thought experiment—you got it wrong. Turning the wheel to the right and then straightening it out causes the car to head in a direction that is diagonal to its original direction. It will cross the lane to the right, as you intended, but it will keep going to the right indefinitely until it zooms off the road. What you needed to do as your car crossed the lane to the right was to then turn the wheel to the left, just as far as you had turned it to the right, and then straighten it out again. This will cause the car to again head straight in the new lane.
Consider the fact that if you’re a regular driver, you’ve done this maneuver thousands of times. Are you not conscious when you do this? Have you never paid attention to what you are actually doing when you change lanes? Assuming that you are not reading this book in a hospital while recovering from a lane-changing accident, you have clearly mastered this skill. Yet you are not conscious of what you did, however many times you’ve accomplished this task.
When people tell stories of their experiences, they describe them as sequences of situations and decisions. But this is not how we experience a story in the first place. Our original experience is as a sequence of high-level patterns, some of which may have triggered feelings. We remember only a small subset of those patterns, if that. Even if we are reasonably accurate in our recounting of a story, we use our powers of confabulation to fill in missing details and convert the sequence into a coherent tale. We cannot be certain what our original conscious experience was from our recollection of it, yet memory is the only access we have to that experience. The present moment is, well, fleeting, and is quickly turned into a memory, or, more often, not. Even if an experience is turned into a memory, it is stored, as the PRTM indicates, as a high-level pattern composed of other patterns in a huge hierarchy. As I have pointed out several times, almost all of the experiences we have (like any of the times we changed lanes) are immediately forgotten. So ascertaining what constitutes our own conscious experience is actually not attainable.