Will robots see?

Will robots ever really see? Imagine a robot 10,000 years in the future. At that time we should finally understand the visual system and be able to build robots whose visual performance surpasses humans'. We will then ask: when a robot claims to be seeing, are its sensations the same as mine? The problem is to connect the first person "feel" of an event (qualia) to the third person performance or. explanation of the same event. Neuroscience is gradually making progress in connecting third person behavior (including your consciousness) to the simpler activity and interactions of neurons and molecules. The question to be discussed in this chapter is different. It is how subjective, first person, qualia (my consciousness) fits into the structure of objective science. This chapter has three parts. First, I examine what it will take to convince me that robots can truly see or feel. I will argue that passing a performance test, such as the Thring test (Thring, 1950), is not sufficient since a performance test does not tell me what the robot is actually feeling. I do believe, however, that a robot from 10,000 years in the future should be able to convince me that it really does have the same raw sensations (e.g. the color qualia) as those that I feel. However, even though robotic qualia may someday exist, I claim that there will still be a barrier to reducing the qualia to the robot's circuitry. The preceding sentence with its denial of reductionism would sound quite weird were it not for the existence of another nonreduc-tionistic theory: quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, the central theory and framework for all of chemistry (and therefore biology) and almost all of physics, is a dualistic theory with a split between the observer and the observed. The second part of the chapter discusses the nature of the quantum duality. The main thesis of this chapter is that the existence of a consistent duality for specifying the role of the observer provides new grounding for exploring how the mind might be related to the body. Knowing that a self-consistent duality is possible gives one courage to explore the possible connection between the duality of quantum mechanics and the duality of the mind-body problem. The third part of this chapter connects the quantum duality to the qualia duality and the role of the homunculus. The present chapter clarifies and emphasizes points …