Are We Just Really Smart Robots?

• Author: Clark, Thomas W.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Kenneth Silber ("Are We Just Really Smart Robots?," April) is worried about the encroaching scientific understanding of our brains and behavior. If science shows us to be simply smart biological machines, he believes this undermines liberal democracy, human rights, moral responsibility, and self-worth; all is permitted and authoritarian regimes will flourish.

Fortunately, he argues, John Searle (in Mind: A Brief Introduction) and Jeff Hawkins (in On Intelligence) have shown the mechanistic thesis is false, so we needn't worry. Human beings, although part of nature, nevertheless have a special something that grounds our dignity and value.

The difficulty is that Silber doesn't quite specify what this special something might be. Is it consciousness? Nothing in Searle's biological naturalism or in Hawkins' account of intelligence requires that our capacity for consciousness couldn't be computable and thus a property of a machine, once we understand the functions of the neural processes subserving consciousness. Could it be free will? But even Searle admits that the experience of free will might be an illusion, perhaps an adaptive illusion at that (although it's more likely the result of not being able to see the causal workings of our own brains). Could it be personhood? Personhood rests on physically instantiated capacities for sentience...