invested with complex functionalities

UK TV Channel 4's new series, Humans (Sun nights @ 9pm), has got people's attention. It's a drama with Robots, or Synths as they are termed in the show, and its subject matter is the usual concern about artificial intelligence (AI) threatening the social order. One character, a concerned professor, even makes a speech about the singularity. It's that kind of script, plenty of inter-human relationship problems but underwritten by big ideas, not the least that of affection between humans and machines (see here for some preliminary notes on the general subject).

It's a growing concern in popular culture, as movies like Her, Ex Machina and Transcendence demonstrate, but its becoming an issue in economics and politics too. Thoughts about the great "decoupling" of workers from production are stirring debate about how our current economic structures are going to support idle populations. (It could also be viewed as the deeper question prompting current interest in the Citizens Income, which has advocates on the liberal Left see EC730 and libertarian Right.)  

For this blog, however, the main question is how our culture deals with the nature of consciousness, and what discussion about AI reveals about the dominance of what I term, materialist realism. That robots are becoming a feature of our landscape is obvious, but fears that they will come to rival us, as conscious organisms in a competitive power game, is clearly a projection of our own drives onto what will be simply usefully functioning adjuncts to our world. 

Artificial limbs activated by brainwaves is just one way the human body is becoming enhanced by robot technology, but consciousness in this instance remains with the human. Under material realist presumptions, consciousness is only the interaction of certain forms of insentient matter, so, for materialist realists, consciousness might just as easily develop in a machine that has been invested with the complex functionalities of a human kind. 

From our perspective, this is a complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is, but provides a useful context for the kind of discussion that places this fundamental question of human existing in a popular framework. We need a much more sensible approach to metaphysics to grasp the nature of our own sentience, of which consciousness is the foundation, and allay fears about future wars with machines that betray present time confusion and ignorance. 

pic from here