Evolving Robot Consciousness The Easy Problems and the Rest

Car manufacturers need robots that reliably and mindlessly repeat sequences of actions in a well organised environment For many other purposes au tonomous robots are needed that will behave appropriately in a disorganised environment that will react adaptively when faced with circumstances that they have never faced before The design of autonomous robots has an intimate relationship with the study of autonomous animals and humans robots provide a convenient puppet show for illustrating current myths about cognition Like it or not any approach to the design of autonomous robots is underpinned by some philosophical position in the designer Whereas a philosophical position normally has to survive in debate in a project of building situated robots one s philosophical position a ects design decisions and is then tested in the real world doing philosophy of mind with a screwdriver In this paper I shall rst follow other authors in distinguishing various uses of the word consciousness Using Chalmers characterisation of the easy problems of consciousness Chalmers I shall show how the evo lutionary approach to robotics handles them But then the main focus of the paper will be what Chalmers calls the hard problem which I will suggest is an easy non problem