来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2021年7月7日
There is disagreement over whether machines can ever be conscious, let alone how we would know if one were. Your view may depend on how you see consciousness.
对于机器是否会有意识，人们存在分歧，更不用说我们如何知道机器是否会有意识了。你的观点可能取决于你如何看待意识。
If the subjective feeling of consciousness is an illusion created by brain processes, then machines that replicate such processes would be conscious in the way that we are. How would we know this? Daniel Dennett at Tufts University thinks a Turing test, in which a machine has to convince a human interrogator that it is conscious, should be enough.
如果意识的主观感觉是大脑过程产生的错觉，那么复制这种过程的机器就会像我们一样有意识。我们是怎么知道的？塔夫茨大学的丹尼尔·丹尼特认为，图灵测试就足够了。在图灵测试中，机器必须使人类询问者相信它是有意识的。
Michael Graziano at Princeton University thinks we could take a more direct approach. His attention schema hypothesis sees consciousness as the brain’s simplified model of its own workings – a representation of how it represents things. He believes it is possible to build a machine that possesses a similar self-reflective model. “If we can build it in a way that we can see into its guts, then we will know this is a machine that has a rich self-description,” he says. “It is a machine that thinks and believes it has consciousness. And those are confirmable because you can understand, in principle, how the machine is processing information.”
普林斯顿大学的Graziano认为我们可以采取更直接的方法。他的注意力图式假说认为意识是大脑自身运作的简化模型——是大脑如何表达事物的一种表征。他认为，制造一台拥有类似自反射模型的机器是可能的。他说:“如果我们能以一种能看到其内部结构的方式建造它，那么我们就会知道这是一台具有丰富自我描述的机器。它是一台能思考并相信自己有意识的机器。这些都是可以确认的，因为原则上你可以理解机器是如何处理信息的。”
For Graziano, consciousness could appear in any machine, whether it is purely in software or constructed of matter, biological or otherwise. Anil Seth at the University of Sussex isn’t so sure. For him, determining whether a machine is conscious requires making informed judgements based on whether, for example, it has analogues of brain structures that we know are important for consciousness in humans, and what it is made of.
格拉齐亚诺认为，意识可以出现在任何机器中，无论它是纯软件还是由生物或其他物质构成。萨塞克斯大学的阿尼尔·塞思对此并不确定。对他来说，判断一台机器是否有意识需要做出可靠的判断，比如，它是否有我们知道对人类意识很重要的类似大脑结构，以及它是由什么组成的。
Identifying consciousness in a machine may be more straightforward if you subscribe to the integrated information theory of consciousness. In principle, this simply entails ensuring that phi, a quantity indicating the degree of information integration within the system, is greater than zero. In practice, calculating phi is computationally intractable for anything but the simplest of systems. So, even if a machine were designed to integrate information, it would be far beyond our abilities to tell whether it is conscious.
如果你认同意识的综合信息理论，那么在机器中识别意识可能会更简单。原则上，这只需要确保phi(表示系统内信息集成程度的一个量)大于零。在实践中，除了最简单的系统外，计算phi是很难的。所以，即使机器被设计来整合信息，我们也无法判断它是否有意识。
Phil Maguire at the National University of Ireland goes further. He notes that, by definition, integrated systems can’t be understood by looking at their parts. “Machines are made up of components that can be analysed independently,” he says. “They are disintegrated. Disintegrated systems can be understood without resorting to the interpretation of consciousness.” In other words, machines can’t be conscious.
爱尔兰国立大学的菲尔•马奎尔更进一步。他指出，根据定义，综合系统不能通过观察其部分来理解。“机器是由可以独立分析的组件组成的，”他说。“机器是非综合的。非综合系统不需要借助于意识的解释就可以被理解。”换句话说，机器不能有意识。
Selmer Bringsjord at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute agrees – but for different reasons. He thinks our subjective feeling of being conscious is the outcome of non-material stuff of some sort, and that this is crucial for some of our intelligent behaviour. For him, machines can never possess this essence, so will never be conscious or intelligent in the way that we are.
伦斯勒理工学院的塞尔默·布林斯博德对此表示同意，但理由不同。他认为我们有意识的主观感觉是某种非物质的结果，这对我们的一些智能行为至关重要。在他看来，机器永远不可能拥有这种本质，所以永远不会像我们一样有意识或有智慧。