Machine
Consciousness
by Owen Holland, ed.
Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK, 2003
192 pp., illus. Paper, $29.90
ISBN: 0-907845-24X.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
Machine consciousness, just as much as
artificial intelligence, is a perfect
conversation topic for a dinner with friends
or colleagues. Believers and non-believers,
careless whether they are or aren't well
informed, will defend their point of view
with unyielding vigour, and virtual blood
will be spilled. Soon, all parties may
settle down in their trenches, firing
salvo's from time tot time till fatigue
and intoxication take over and the debate
is closed on an inconclusive note such
as "we need to define our terms more precisely"
or "in twenty years time, we will see
that . . ."
In any case, and if you are the host,
it might be a good idea to offer your
guests a copy of Machine Consciousness
well in advance and let them carefully
study at least a few of the essays in
this collection. Believers of the Turing-test
kind ('if it acts as if it were conscious,
who are we to say that it isn't conscious?')
will find themselves drawn to "Axioms
and Tests for the Presence of Minimal
Consciousness in Agents" by Igor
Alexander and Barry Dunmall. Engineers
of all sorts with a bend towards the pragmatic
('if we can't understand it, let's try
to build it'), will be cheering descriptions
of "Cyberchild: A Simulation Test-Bed
for Consciousness Studies" by Rodney
Cotterill, "IDA: A Conscious Artifact?"
by Stan Franklin and "Robots with
Internal Models: A Route to Machine Consciousness?"
by Owen Holland and Ron Goodman. Adventurous
readers with a passion for philosophy
will find themselves enthralled by Stevan
Harnad's "Can a Machine Be Conscious?
How?" and even more so by "Virtual
Machines and Consciousness" by eminence
grise in the field Aaron Sloman and
his colleague Ron Chrisley. Roboticists
and emergence-ists will undoubtedly want
to know what Luc Steels has to say in
"Language Re-Entrance and the Inner
Voice," while mystics, mysticists,
mysterians and sci-fi fans will look for
their cup of tea in "Level-Headed
Mysterianism and Artificial Experience"
by Jesse Prinz and "The Borg or Borges?"
by William Irwin Thompson.
Not enough? Do you think the whole debate
is futile? You still can resistthough
resistance in this case might indeed be
futileafter reading Susan
Blackmore's "Consciousness in Meme
Machines," who plainly states that
consciousness is an illusion, a trendy
way to describe the fact that memes are
"competing for replication by human hosts".
And that "[s]ome memes survive by being
promoted as personal beliefs, desires,
opinions and possessions, leading to the
formation of a memeplex (or selfplex).
Any machine capable of imitation would
acquire this type of illusion and think
it was conscious" (p.19).
I am aware that I can't give this book
its due by simply listing the titles and
the general flags under which they sail,
but that is simply a consequence of the
sheer wealth of ideas that are presented
by leading researchers in the field looking
at the problem of machine (and human)
consciousness from all possible angles.
Owen Holland has succeeded in bringing
together 13 top scientists and philosophers
over a topic that will take them much
further than one dinner to discuss. He
has had the courage to bring in people
with very divergent ideas and let them
speak out, uncensored and without any
restriction apart from the condition that
they have something important to say.
Now hurry, organise that dinner in a month
or so and make sure to include this book
in the invitation.