The construction is independent of any specific definition of
consciousness. It shows how consciousness might be produced from non-
conscious devices.
Start off with millions of identical ordinary (non-conscious) robots.
Each robot is pre-programmed to collect things from the environment at
random (twigs, elastic bands, teacups, wheels, orange peel etc), and
incorporate them into itself, gradually replacing all its original
component parts as it does so. Now let the robots free to interact
with the environment for a while.
Most of the robots would cease to function quite rapidly, of course.
They might replace one of their vital components (the computer
program, for example), with a piece of orange peel, and immediately
stop working permanently. Some might continue to function for quite a
while, making meaningless minor alterations to their original
structure, without affecting their basic operation as the programmed
mechanical device we started off with, which we knew to be non-
conscious, and we can ignore them. We can also ignore robots which
have replaced themselves with biological material which was already
conscious, because they are not the sort of 'constructed
consciousness' that we are interested in.
The robots we are interested in are those which have managed to
replace all their constituent components, including their original
computer hardware and software, with non-biological material that they
have picked up from the environment, but are still functioning like
the original robots. The random self-construction may have led to a
strange wheeled mechanism made out of orange peel, teacups and elastic
bands held together with bits of wood, with its understanding of
reality contained in the vibrational processes occurring in millions
of twig-twanged elastic bands, which wanders around in the natural
environment apparently decorating itself with the bits of garbage it
picks up. It is of course extremely unlikely that such a thing, or
any similar 'randomly constructed' functioning being, would ever
occur, but the possibility that millions of monkeys randomly operating
typewriters would produce the occasional Shakespeare sonnet is
similarly unlikely. However, in either case, if you started with
sufficient non-conscious robots, or if you left the monkeys typing
long enough, they would eventually achieve the objective. The
resulting things, whose workings and principles of operation might be
a mystery to us, have like ourselves, been created out of material
from the environment, so they might be conscious, as we are.
Perhaps the resultant being has improved on its original design and is
now conscious? Consciousness is a subjective experience, so there is
no way of determining whether or not anything or anybody is
conscious. But at any rate, the self-constructed thing would not be
less conscious than the non-conscious robot it began as.
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