Daniel Dennett - Consciouness Explained
if the self is "just" the Center of Narrative Gravity, and if all the
phenomena of human consciousness are explicable as "just" the activities
of a virtual machine realized in the astronomically adjustable connections
of a human brain, then, in principle, a suitably "programmed"
robot, with a silicon-based computer brain, would be conscious, would
have a self. More aptly, there would be a conscious self whose body
was the robot and whose brain was the computer. This implication of
my theory strikes some people as obvious and unobjectionable. "Of
course we're machines! We're just very, very complicated, evolved machines
made of organic molecules instead of metal and silicon, and we
are conscious, so there can be conscious machines — us." For these
readers, this implication was a foregone conclusion. What has proved
to be interesting to them, I hope, are the variety of unobvious implications
encountered along the way, in particular those that show how
much of the commonsense Cartesian picture must be replaced as we
learn more about the actual machinery of the brain.
if the self is "just" the Center of Narrative Gravity, and if all the
phenomena of human consciousness are explicable as "just" the activities
of a virtual machine realized in the astronomically adjustable connections
of a human brain, then, in principle, a suitably "programmed"
robot, with a silicon-based computer brain, would be conscious, would
have a self. More aptly, there would be a conscious self whose body
was the robot and whose brain was the computer. This implication of
my theory strikes some people as obvious and unobjectionable. "Of
course we're machines! We're just very, very complicated, evolved machines
made of organic molecules instead of metal and silicon, and we
are conscious, so there can be conscious machines — us." For these
readers, this implication was a foregone conclusion. What has proved
to be interesting to them, I hope, are the variety of unobvious implications
encountered along the way, in particular those that show how
much of the commonsense Cartesian picture must be replaced as we
learn more about the actual machinery of the brain.
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