%A Daniel C. Dennett
%T Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds
%X The best reason for believing that robots might some day  become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily  complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating  according to the same well-understood principles that govern  all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance. It may be wildly over-ambitious to suppose that human artificers can repeat Nature's triumph, with variations  in material, form, and design process, but this is not a deep objection. It is not as if a conscious machine contradicted any fundamental laws of nature, the way a perpetual motion  machine does. Still, many skeptics believe--or in any event want to believe--that it will never be done. I wouldn't wager against them, but my reasons for skepticism are mundane,  economic reasons, not theoretical reasons.
%D 1994
%L cogprints429

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