sam weissman is another major character in this book who early in the story expressed skepticism about the concept of making a conscious machine. He felt it absurd to do so since “it’s a machine, albeit a really complex one; but in the end, it’s just a machine that executes code written by humans. . . . was it really necessary to define consciousness in order to recreate it? . . . . the consensus of the best and brightest minds in the field . . . was that consciousness is, like in the human brain, a derived attribute of the machine and its software. it’s an emergent property of its processing. in other words, if its designers were successful in mimicking enough of the neural activity of the human brain in their hardware and software, then that would be sufficient for consciousness to arise spontaneously.”
so we see how materialist reductionism had to be confronted by the building and encoding of rodin! we will address the role of autonomy in the next blog post.