Lately I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis. It all started when I was petting my cat. My cat is fairly fat and very lazy. She’s also pretty old. That is, she doesn’t do much of anything, and she won’t be able to not do anything for very much longer. Yet we have a legitimate relationship. I pet her, she looks cute and arches her neck; I feed her, she sheds all over my bed; I clean her poop, she lays on my feet when they are cold. These relationships are not very reciprocal. I take care of her, care for her, maintain her bodily waste, while all she does, essentially, is exist in a manner I happen to find to be adorable. She doesn’t do anything for me, yet I invest not only care and effort, but genuine emotion and affection for her. Why do I care for her? Soon she will die, and there’s no way I will not be very very sad about this. Why do I put up with this? Should I care for her, even though, after she’s gone, it won’t have meant anything that I did? Even though I can’t come up with a sturdy justification for my actions, at the same time I know I won’t stop giving her water when she hops into the bathroom sink. Maybe it’s because I know she has a finite life span, and that life span happens to be within mine, that I care for her. Maybe that’s what separates our actions and emotions towards “authentic,” sentient beings and man-made machines. Maybe it does have to do with, as Professor Turkle (i think) asserted, death, and fear of death. Now, each time I pet my cat on the underside of her pink belly, I will be confronting my own innate fear of death, of my family’s eventual death, of my own, of how everything I take the time to love I will eventually unlove. I don’t think I’d pet a robot because I know it isn’t bound to a life cycle I can relate to, and I wouldn’t confront any of my own basic fears in relating intimately with a robot.

I’m not sure if this makes any sense in writing, but it is at least somewhat related in my mind.

“If consciousness is, in fact, an outgrowth of our relationships … then I don’t see any barrier to robots developing a self awareness. And then what?”

IMO, this is an extremely important idea that should not be missed. The problem however is we don’t have anything resembling a quasi-rigorous understanding/description of consciousness; certainly no consensous. This statement contains an implied understanding of consciousness that relies upon something akin to emergence. We understand it by observing some of the properties that emerge from the system we call consciousness. A reasonable heuristic for both introspection and inter-spection. I would enjoy hearing some folks with some expertise on emergence, non-linear systems, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, etc. The Santa Fe Institute has some very excellent folks with wide and deep cross-disciplinary research upon these types of matters. http://www.santafe.edu/