A MATTER OF ETHICS
ONE ARGUMENT that can be drawn out of Hanson’s work is whether these brain emulations would be conscious. After all, if the Ems do all the work, and humans retire and live on the profits, isn’t there a word for that? As in Star Wars, where an army of apparently sentient droids obeys and are the property of the biological creatures, would we be condemning them to a nightmare of our own making?
The question of whether computers will be conscious may never be answered. Hanson asserts there’s no way to tell: “If we mean it in the informal descriptive sense, of having some sense of self like humans do, that you can ask questions like ‘what did you do yesterday?’ or ‘how did you feel about that?’ then most computers are like that. And we could create computers that are more like that.
“If you mean there’s something about a human that feels in addition to how it behaves, what it remembers, and its coherent story of itself, and these feelings are not reducible to plans, memories, or calculations, but are something else that’s a part of us that’s not included in the computery parts of ourselves, that there’s some extra part of humans beyond the physical, we’ll never really know about what causes it or where it comes from.
“You’ll probably never really know if anybody you meet ever feels; the left side of your brain never knows whether the right side of your brain feels, and the you of today can never really know if the you of the past or the future really feels. All you know about these things comes through physical channels. And if people still think these questions make sense in the age of Ems, they will still disagree about it then.”