Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

The minimal ingredients would seem to be these. It needs some way of telling whether it is itself moving. In particular it needs some ability to distinguish whether it is moving, and getting new views of stationary objects, or whether it is still, and the objects around it are moving. To do this, it needs a memory of what the scene was like, to compare to what it is now like. It needs to be able to represent the order of different appearances, and then it needs some way of integrating the past scenes and the present scene. In other words, to solve for the position of objects in space, it has to solve for its own point of view and for elapsed time during which it can log its own movements. What this suggests is that a minimal self-consciousness is a structural requirement on any kind of interpretation of experience. If the programmer can solve this problem for the robot, it cannot be by giving it just another ingredient on the screen (as if the camera always caught a glimpse of one of its wheels, down at the bottom of the screen). That would just be more ‘input’. It wouldn’t be part of the programming needed to turn input into a description of the room and of the robot’s place in it. In fact the robot need never catch any glimpse of itself. The camera can be rigidly pointed at the scene in front of it. This is why Hume would have been no nearer catching himself even if whenever he turned his eye inward he caught a continuing element of experience, like a background drone. W...