Full bibliography

This chapter discusses the relationship between compliance to syntactically defined legislation and consciousness: whether in order to obey laws a robot would need to be conscious. This leads to consideration of what Emergent Information Theory can tell us about the possibility of artificial consciousness as such. Various arguments based on similarities and differences between biological and technological physical and informational systems are presented, with the conclusion that direct replication of a human type of consciousness is improbable. However, our understandable tendency to consider our own type of consciousness as uniquely special and valuable is challenged and found to be unfounded. Other high-level emergent phenomena in the information dimensions of artificial systems may, while different, be equally deserving of a comparable status.

Num Pages: 4