Commander Data and Robot Rabbit
Michael Tye · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016
Could there be a conscious robot? Could Commander Data, the character from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who looks and behaves like a human but is in fact entirely mechanical, feel pain? In general, could a creature built of inorganic material be conscious? The position taken in this chapter is that it is rational for us to prefer the view that some such beings, if they are suitably behaviorally complex, are conscious, for the same reasons laid out in earlier chapters for other humans and for other mammals, as well as fish and some invertebrates: they seem conscious, so the likeliest conclusion is that they are.