Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

tell us they’ve cracked it! But all that would have happened is that we would have reduced humanity to the level of dumb, blind, stupid machinery.

I think instead that we should look somewhere else when searching for that elusive something that makes conscious beings conscious. We should start with the thing that is most apparent to us — we have agency, we have choice. There is something different about a living, conscious being that sets us apart from other things in the world. We would find it impossible to navigate the world if we had to continually deny the fact of our own agency. But things like rocks and tables we recognise as things that are not agents. There is a sliding scale of the things and creatures that are considered as agents on the world. Agency is an emergent quality of life.

So, will computers ever be conscious? Without flesh and blood bodies it is difficult to see this as being possible — although, like our hypothetical zombies, they may get very good at faking it. To create consciousness from scratch then becomes a question of creating artificial life. And will this ever be possible? I think perhaps yes — this seems like a more likely scenario. We have to ask though whether this is really desirable. What exactly would be the point, when nature herself has created such a variety of life-forms?

So agency is the thing that modern science seems to want to deny, even although everyone’s life — in fact, all conscious life — seems to demonstrate its truth. Why this insistence that it’s all a delusion? Perhaps it is

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