Machine Consciousness: Plausible Idea or Semantic Distortion?

The author found the "Journal of Consciousness Studies," (JCS) issue on Machine Consciousness, (2003), frustrating and alienating. It is argued that there seems to be a consensus building that consciousness is accessible to scientific scrutiny, so much so that it is already understood well enough to be modeled and even synthesized. It could be instead that the vocabulary of consciousness is being subtly redefined to be amenable to scientific investigation and explicit modeling. Such semantic revisionism is confusing and often misleading. Whatever else consciousness is, it is at least a certain quality of life apparent from personal reflection. Introspection is, after all, the only way we know that consciousness even exists. Scientific and technical redefinitions that fail to account for its phenomenal quality are at best incomplete. In the author's view, all but one of the ten articles in the JCS volume on Machine Consciousness commit various degrees of Protean distortion. In this collection of articles, common sense terms describing consciousness were consistently distorted into special uses that strip them of their meaning. The author has tried to point out in criticism of the JCS articles, explicit principles that are missing in the account of machine consciousness, leaving the various inferences about consciousness open to charges of being distorted and illegitimate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

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