Robots, Zombies and Us by Robert Kirk

Author:Robert Kirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

9

What’s needed on top of the basic package

1. The thesis

The rabbitoid is a peculiar kind of creature. It looks like a normal rabbit and in many ways behaves like one, yet it lacks something necessary for perceptual consciousness. When normal rabbits are going about their business, incoming perceptual information is immediately available for use – and they cannot prevent it from being so. With rabbitoids, in contrast, the information is just fed into memory and takes its place among current beliefs; from there it might be called up or just pop up at random. I can now state the main thesis of this book: a system is perceptually conscious if and only if it has the basic package and cannot choose to prevent incoming perceptual information from being available for immediate use. In the course of this chapter, I will try to make this thesis reasonably clear.

2. The presence of perceptual information

You may recall something said earlier about information. The acquisition, storage, and retrieval of information consists of changes in the system’s internal states, changes which affect a whole range of internal processes and contribute to guiding its behaviour in ways related to whatever interactions with the environment caused the changes. (The changes in our case, of course, consist of electrochemical reactions among billions of neurones.) And now it is important to keep in mind that events describable in one vocabulary are often redescribable in others. In particular, descriptions such as ‘interpretation’, ‘decision-making’, and ‘perceptual information’ apply to processes and states also describable in terms of the states and interactions of neurones and neurotransmitters – and their applicability doesn’t require anything in addition to those low-level processes; they are just redescriptions. Talking in these terms is a way of talking about what’s happening down among the neurones, or in the case of artefacts, among such things as electronic circuits. In particular, talking about acquiring perceptual information is a way of talking about changes occurring at those low levels, in spite of the fact that most of us are ignorant of which low-level processes are involved, just as people talked about lightning and eclipses ages before anyone had investigated electricity or discovered the actual motions of the sun and moon.

I will say that when a system with the basic package – a decider – cannot prevent incoming perceptual information from being available for immediate use, the information is ‘present’. (In other works I have used ‘directly active’ instead of ‘present’.) The presence of information in this sense shows up in indefinitely many ways. In particular, it doesn’t have to be called up; doesn’t have to be waited for until it comes to mind; doesn’t have to be guessed at, as it does in the case of blindsight. Those negative features are consequences of the fact that the information is available for immediate use no matter what the system may do, short of blocking its eyes, ears, or whatever. For most of us in normal circumstances, the flow of incoming conscious perceptual

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