Emotion

Can robots have human feelings?

Comments

If you mean 'Can a computer have human feelings?', then the answer seems to be probably not.

One of the main characteristics of a computer is that you can build it out of any physical stuff you like: clockwork, silicon, carbon, some might say, even Swiss cheese. What a computer is made out of is (to a first approximation) unimportant, all that matters is that its material is organised in the right way.

Now consider the the following project (thought up by Ned Block): give each of the 1.3 billion people in China a 2-way radio and ask him/her to simulate the computational behaviour of a single neuron. Then arrange the network of radio connections between individual Chinese people to exactly mirror the arrangement of neurons in your brain. The Chinese nation now appears to be able to perform any computation that your brain performs. Yet it seems bizarre to say that the Chinese nation---as a group, not as individual people---would experience pain, happiness, itchiness, and so on. It seems implausible that such a system would have any feelings at all, no matter what computation you ask it to perform. So it does not seem that a system can have feelings purely in virtue of performing a computation---some other ingredient is required.

There is a lot of discussion of this case, including an explanation of how to extend to a full-blown robot. See Ned Block's original article if you are interested in more:

Block, N. (1978). Troubles with functionalism. In Block, N., editor (1980). Readings in Philosophy and Psychology, volume 1. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Read another response by Mark Sprevak

Read another response about Emotion