Why Some Machines May Need Qualia and How They Can Have Them: Including a Demanding New Turing Test for Robot Philosophers

摘要

This paper extends three decades of work arguing that instead of focusing only on (adult) human minds, we should study many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, and try to under-stand the space containing all of them, by studying what they do, how they do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements that are met by different sorts of minds, i.e. the niches that they occupy, (b) understanding the space of pos-sible designs, and (c) understanding the complex and varied relationships between requirements and designs. Attempts to model or explain any particular phenomenon, such as vision, emotion, learning, language use, or consciousness lead to muddle and confusion unless they are placed in that broader context. in part because current ontologies for specifying