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 resist——though resistance in this case might indeed be futile——after 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.