TEXT D Unlike any other
scientific topics, consciousness—the first-person awareness of the world
around—is truly in the eye of beholder. I know I am conscious. But how do I know
that you are Through logical analogy—I am a conscious human
being, and therefore you as a human being are also likely to be conscious—I
conclude I am probably not the only conscious being in a world of biological pup
pets. Extend it to other creatures, and uncertainty grows. Is a dog conscious
An elm A rock "We don’t have the mythical consciousness
meter," said Dr. Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and director of the Center
for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. "All we have directly to
go on is behavior." So without even an elementary understanding of what
consciousness is, the idea of instilling it into a machine—or understanding how
a machine might evolve consciousness—becomes almost
unfathomable①. The field of artificial intelligence
started out with dreams of making thinking or conscious machines, but to debate,
its achievements have been modest. The field has evolved to focus more on
solving practical problems like complex scheduling tasks than on imitating human
behavior. But many believe that the original goals of artificial
intelligence will be attainable within a few decades. Some
people, like Dr. Hans Moravec, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pitts burgh, believe a human being is nothing more than a fancy
machine, and that it will be possible to build a machine with the same features,
that there is nothing magical about the brain and biological flesh. "I’m
confident we can build robot with behavior that is just as rich as human being
behavior," he said. "You could quiz it as much as you like about its internal
mental life, and it would answer as any human being." To Dr. Moravec, if it acts
consciously, it is conscious. To ask more is pointless. Dr.
Chalmers, regards consciousness as an unutterable trait, and it may be useless
to try to pin it down. "We’ve got to admit something here is irreducible," he
said. "Some primitive precursor conscious ness could go all the way down" to the
smallest, most primitive organisms, he said. Dr. Chalmers too sees nothing
fundamentally different between a creature of flesh and blood and one of metal,
plastics and electronic circuits. "I’m quite open to the idea that machines
might eventually become conscious," he said, adding that it would be "equally
weird". And if a person gets into involved conversations with a robot about
everything from Kant to baseball, "We’ll be as practically certain they are
conscious as other people," he said. "Of course, that doesn’t resolve the
theoretical question". But others say machines, regardless of
how complex, will never match people. The arguments can become
mysterious. In his book Shadows of the Mind, Dr. Roger Penrose, a mathematician
at Oxford University, enlisted the incompleteness theorem in mathematics. He
uses the theorem, which states that any system of theorems will invariably
include statements that cannot be proven, to argue that any machine that uses
computation—and hence all robots—will invariably fall short of the
accomplishments of human mathematicians. Instead, he argues that consciousness
is an effect of quantum mechanics in tiny structures in the brain that exceeds
the abilities of any computer②. The case of Dr. Roger Penrose intends to ______.
A.indicate that robot is much more intelligent than human beings B.reveal the futility of human beings in the mathematics’ problem solving C.show the weakness of the robot in some areas and it is not omniscient D.tell us artificial intelligence is no more clever than human beings