it’s obvious that the problem of consciousness isn’t this sort of problem. If it was, Oliver Sacks would already have wriiten a book about it. People don’t have strokes which leave them unchanged in every way except they’re no longer conscious.
Well, that may be that, and you can move right along to another topic, but it’s unlikely. Someone, at some point, is bound to bring up the subject of computers. They’re clever aren’t they, computers? They can play chess. They’re already halfway conscious!
This is something you’re going to have to be prepared for. What if someone told you that the computer over there, third on the left, had become conscious overnight? No, not that one, the one next to it. You’d go over, turn it on, and type in something – I don’t know, “Hi there!”. On the screen comes the reply, “Well, hi! Thank God someone’s logged on! I was getting kind of bored here. Can we play a game of chess or backgammon? Or do you want to ask me some questions? Go on – ask me some questions.” It’s the old Turing test – can we distinguish between a computer and a human? Can computers talk? Don’t be taken in; what’s happened here clearly is that some smartarse has developed some fancy software. In fact more and more smartarses are going to develop more and more fancy software. But the idea that at some point the computer is just going to take over and start talking on its own is ludicrous. Computers are tools, for God’s sake! It’s like expecting your bicycle to decide it wants to take a different route because it doesn’t like the road surface the way you normally go.
A topic that may well make its appearance at this point is the notion of emergence. The idea is that as things get more and more complex, everything moves up to a new level, with properties that couldn’t have been predicted from the original set-up. So an ant colony for instance behaves in ways that you couldn’t predict from looking at individual ants. And so with computers, the theory goes. At a certain point after so many billions of connections and so much parallel processing and all the rest of it, something happens, some new unpredictable property just appears – well who’d have thought? – and these computers suddenly….what?….smell of cheese?…..levitate emitting a high-pitched humming sound?…..or, become conscious.
Clearly this is magical thinking. And you should perhaps point out that there are already emergent properties of computers, like the Internet for example. Who would have thought of that in the early days of computing? But this has nothing to do with consciousness. It was all down to clever people, even if they didn’t always appreciate where they were going. Computers were the tools they used. You couldn’t have the Internet without computers just like you couldn’t have the Tour de France without bikes.
At this stage in the discussion you can reasonably hope that the subject is finished. But there remains one last possibility which I should mention in the interests of completeness. You may find your interlocutor starting to talk of programmes he’s written (it will be a “he”) involving the setting up of artificial life forms involved in a virtual struggle for survival. Well, by some extraordinary stroke of misfortune you’ve ended up talking to a post-doctoral research fellow in artificial languages or some such (or possibly Richard Dawkins – check for the patterned jumper). There’s no immediate prospect of escape, and you’ll have to feign interest as the talk ranges over survival strategies and algorithms. These virtual creatures will have some stupid whimsical name like “wibbles” (you’re talking to someone whose favourite book is “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”). These wibbles now, after several million generations, seem to be developing societies. They seem to be communicating! Is it possible that they are, in fact, conscious?
This is your last chance. Wittgenstein is the only man who can help you now. Just say, “If a wibble could talk, we could not understand it”. The ensuing silence will provide an excellent opportunity to extricate yourself.
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