Barrington Bayley on Machine Consciousness - The Rod of Light
Posted: Wednesday, January 20, 2010
by Robert Gibson
R&M Tutors
Barrington Bayley is the only author I know to have tackled the philosophical problems of machine consciousness seriously. And after using that word "serious" I hasten to add that his novels are magnificent entertainment.
In "Soul of a Robot" the conclusion was reached, that machine consciousness was impossible by definition; yet that robots might get round this by "stealing the souls of men" - by a process which infuses part of a human soul into a mechanical body.
The most interesting question in the book is, perhaps, the one of motivation. Why should robots seek consciousness if they lack it? And do they really lack it or do they actually already possess consciousness of a kind?
The author and his characters resort partly to metaphor; robotic awareness is at times compared to moonlight, human awareness to sunlight.
Was this glimmering moonlit landscape, then, symbolic of the robot's world? Seen but not really seen? He had often tried to imagine what genuine construct existence was like. Logically it was not like anything - it was not there at all. Yet it did contain thought; there was deliberation in it, and a machine awareness that was like a passive reflection of human consciousness, just as moonlight was a passive reflection of sunlight. In the same way that the moon created a spurious version of the daylit world, so perhaps there was a reflected fictitious world of construct perception, and if one could look into this world perhaps one would see, as it were, a realm under the moon, not quite visible, mysteriously passive and asleep.
My advice is, lose no time in obtaining "Soul of a Robot" and "The Rod of Light". They have what the greatest science fiction has: the special zing and zip of an exploration of boundaries, categories; my words are dry but the phenomenon to which they refer is a tingling excitement.
In "The Rod of Light" you will encounter the robot who craved consciousness; the robot who found and lost it and remembered it "at the millionth remove"; and the robot who was satisfied with things as they were:
"....we think we exist, even though we do not, and in that thought we do exist, after a manner. "
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Very interesting review, which asks the right questions.
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