On the Consciousness of Robots

Abstract

Many essays on the consciousness of robots do not thematise specifically the qualifying conditions of human consciousness. For this reason, this paper focuses on the basic traditional epistemological questions about the nature of natural, human and possibly technically produced consciousness, to prepare the ground on which the questions about consciousness of robots can be asked at all. It requires, in the first place, deliberations on what natural and human consciousness is, as without such clarification about the phenomenon of consciousness, we do not know what we have to look for with technical or experimental means, to be able to determine the consciousness of robots. On a second level, to be able to clarify the topic of ‘other minds’ and questions of inter-subjectivity, i.e. the possibilities of relations of two embodied forms of consciousness among themselves, the so-called hetero-phenomenology or the behavioural research are discussed.