The Meme Machine：（Meme的机器）.pdfVIP

Susan Blackmore Consciousness in Meme Machines Setting aside the problems of recognising consciousness in a machine, this article considers what would be needed for a machine to have human-like conscious- ness. Human-like consciousness is an illusion; that is, it exists but is not what it appears to be. The illusion that we are a conscious self having a stream of experi- ences is constructed when memes compete for replication by human hosts. Some memes survive by being promoted as personal beliefs, desires, opinions and pos- sessions, leading to the formation of a memeplex (or selfplex). Any machine capa- ble of imitation would acquire this type of illusion and think it was conscious. Robots that imitated humans would acquire an illusion of self and consciousness just as we do. Robots that imitated each other would develop their own separate languages, cultures and illusions of self. Distributed seflplexes in large networks of machines are also possible. Unanswered questions include what remains of consciousness without memes, and whether artificial meme machines can ever transcend the illusion of self consciousness. I am going to set aside some of the major problems facing machine consciousness and concentrate on the question of what sort of machines might acquire human- like consciousness. The main problem to be ignored is that we do not know how to recognise con- sciousness in a machine. That is, there is no obvious equivalent of the Turing test for consciousness. I shall define consciousness here in terms of subjectivity; what is sometimes known as ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (Block, 1995) or ‘what it’s like to be’ (Nagel, 1974). With consciousness being subjective, any objective test, such as any variation on the Turing test, fails to grasp it. You could certainly have a test that shows whether other people think a machine is conscious but this is not the same thing, as our eager propensity to attribute fe