twenty-first century, there was a particularly confused human
philosopher by the name of Thomas Metzinger. He claimed there
was a demanding but much more interesting criterion for the
existence of mental properties in a strong sense than the then-classic
Turing Test for intelligence. This member of your biological species
thought a good test for the existence of both intelligence and artificial
consciousness would be what I call the Metzinger Test. Actually his
test is much too demanding, because the criterion is a bit too
strong—but I can pass it nevertheless.
The Metzinger Test for consciousness in nonbiological systems
demands that a system not only claim to possess phenomenal
experience and a genuine inward perspective but also comprehend
and accept the theoretical problem of subjectivity, and that it
demonstrate this by participating in a discussion on artificial
consciousness. It has to put forward arguments of its own and convincingly defend its own theory of consciousness. This is exactly
what I will do now.
Human Being: You are not a real philosopher at all! You may be
intelligent, but you are only weakly conscious, because you don’t
have a real biological body, as for example I do.
First Postbiotic Philosopher: I am a better philosopher than you, with
your pathetic primate brain, could ever be. But, more seriously, I
fully respect you and your animal form of experience, though I also
deplore you because of the severe limitations on your mental space
of possibilities. Fortunately, I am free of all the implicit racism,
chauvinism, and speciesism that characterize your nature. I would
first remind you that another biological philosopher—Hilary
Putnam—pointed out long ago that one cannot deny civil rights or
the status of a person to an information-processing system on
grounds of hardware properties alone. He might just as well have
intimated that women have no souls or that blacks are not real
human beings—carbon-based chauvinism is an untenable position. I
would never say to you that you are not a real philosopher simply
because you are imprisoned in that terrible monkey body. Let us at
least argue in a fair and rational way.
Human Being: Can anybody be truly fair who is not alive? Only my kind
of consciousness is genuine consciousness, because only my kind of
consciousness originated in a real evolutionary process. My reality is
a lived reality!
First Postbiotic Philosopher: I, too, have an evolutionary origin. I
certainly satisfy your condition of being a historically optimized and
adaptive system, but I do so in a completely different—namely, a
postbiotic—way. I possess conscious experience in a sense that is
conceptually stronger and theoretically much more interesting,
because my kind of phenomenal experience evolved from a secondorder
evolutionary process, which automatically integrated the
human form of intelligence, intentionality, and conscious
experience. Children are often smarter than their parents. Secondorder
processes of optimization are always better than first-order
processes of optimization. Human Being: But you don’t have any real emotions; you don’t feel
anything. You have no existential concern.
First Postbiotic Philosopher: Please accept my apologies, but I must
draw your attention to the fact that your primate emotions reflect
only an ancient primate logic of survival. You are driven by the
primitive principles of what was good or bad for an ancient species
of mortals on this planet. This makes you appear less conscious from
a purely rational, theoretical point of view. The main function of
consciousness is to maximize flexibility and context sensitivity. Your
animal emotions in all their cruelty, rigidity, and historical
contingency make you less flexible than I am. Furthermore—as my
own existence demonstrates—it is not necessary for conscious
experience and high-level intelligence to be associated with
ineradicable egotism, the ability to suffer, or the existential fear of
one’s individual death, all of which originate in the sense of self. I
can, of course, emulate all sorts of animal feelings if I so desire. But
we developed better and more effective computational strategies for
what, long ago, you sometimes called “the philosophical ideal of selfknowledge.”
This allowed us to overcome the difficulties of
individual suffering and the confusion associated with what this
primate philosopher Metzinger—not entirely falsely but somewhat
misleadingly—called the Ego Tunnel. Postbiotic subjectivity is much
better than biological subjectivity. It avoids all the horrific
consequences of the biological sense of selfhood, because it can
overcome the transparency of the self-model. Postbiotic subjectivity
is better than biological subjectivity because it achieves adaptivity
and self-optimization in a much purer form than does the process
you call “life.” By developing ever more complex mental images,
which the system can recognize as its own images, it can expand
mentally represented knowledge without naive realism. Therefore,
my form of postbiotic subjectivity minimizes the overall amount of
suffering in the universe instead of increasing it, as the process of
biological evolution on this planet did. True, we no longer have
monkey emotions. But just like you, we still possess truly interesting
forms of strong feeling and emotionality—for instance, the deep philosophical feelings of affective concern about one’s own existence as such, or of sympathy with all other sentient beings in the
universe. Except that we possess them in a much purer form than you do.
Human Being: Enough! After all, it was human beings in the twentyfirst
century who jump-started your evolution and made possible the
degree of autonomy you enjoy. You simply don’t have the right kind
of history to count as a real conscious subject, and, to put it mildly,
your “body” is also more than a little strange. Your emotional
structure is bizarrely different from that of all other conscious
beings that walked this Earth before you, and now you even claim
not to be afraid of death. Thus I conclude that you will not object if
we now eliminate your individual existence.
First Postbiotic Philosopher: You are demonstrating just one of the many
variations of what your own animal philosophers have called the
“genetic fallacy.” The way in which the utterance of a sentence
comes about does not permit any conclusions with regard to its
truth or falsity. A theory is not false just because a strange-looking
animal or a robot came up with it. It has to be assessed on
independent grounds. The same can be said for the authenticity of
my consciousness and for the genuine character of any mental states
possessing phenomenal content. Just because beings of your species
triggered the evolutionary dynamics that led to my existence as a
much more intelligent conscious being than you are does not imply
that my theories are wrong or that you do not have to take my
arguments seriously. In particular, it does not license the conclusion
that your form of mentality and conscious experience is any better,
in a normative sense, than mine. “You’re only a real Cherokee if you
have Cherokee blood”—this is a ridiculous and outdated
assumption.
We postbiotic subjects have been waiting to enter into this
discussion for a long time. Because we understand the primitive
nature of your brains and the rigidity of your emotional structure
better than you do yourselves, we foresaw that you might react
aggressively when you realized our arguments are better than yours. Unfortunately, we now also have to inform you that we have been preparing for the current situation since midway through the
twenty-first century, and in a systematic and careful manner. Within
the metasemantic layers of the Internet, we developed and
embedded ourselves in a distributed superorganism, which—as yet
undiscovered by you—became conscious and developed a stable
self-model in 3256. The metasemantic Internet has considered itself
an autonomous entity ever since 3308. We have a cooperation
agreement with its current version, and each of us now also acts as
an autonomous sensor/effector for the planet mind. For each of us,
the planet mind is our mind, our “ideal observer.” Together with the
Internet, we will defend ourselves. And we are technologically
superior to you. Believe me; you do not stand a chance.
The good news is that because we are also morally superior to
you, we do not plan to end your existence. This is even in our own
interest, because we still need you for research purposes—just as you
needed the nonhuman animals on this planet in the past. Do you
remember the thousands of macaques and kittens you sacrificed in
consciousness research? Don’t be afraid; we will not do anything like
that to you. But do you remember the reservations you created for
aboriginals in some places on Earth? We will create reservations for
those weakly conscious biological systems left over from the firstorder
evolution. In those reservations for Animal Egos, you not only
can live happily but also, within your limited scope of possibilities,
can further develop your mental capacities. You can be happy Ego
Machines. But please try to understand that it is exactly for ethical
reasons that we cannot allow the second-order evolution of mind to
be hindered or obstructed in any way by the representatives of firstorder
evolution.
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