Molly Graham

With increasing development and widespread interest in artificial intelligence and robotics over the last several years, novel solutions are being considered for addressing specific problems in a number of domains. In particular, caring for elderly individuals in regions where human labour is insufficient is of special interest. One aspect of this involves an ability to communicate and socialize with people in a familiar and humanlike manner, with an ability to understand human emotion through behavioural cues and language. Furthermore, social robots should be able to act with empathy if we are interested in using them for tasks related to eldercare and healthcare, as empathy involves the adoption of another person’s perspective. This work investigates whether social robots are capable of meeting these requirements, and ultimately demonstrates that they cannot exhibit genuine acts of empathy. By investigating one robot in particular named iCub, it becomes apparent that it will not be able to understand human emotions given its cognitive architecture. iCub’s framework lacks the kind of affective regulation observed in people and animals, and as such, is unable to experience its own form of emotions. Consequently, iCub is incapable of understanding what emotions are and what they mean to humans. For social robots, an alternative solution which relies on experiences of emotions should instead be pursued. The cognitive architecture developed by Pentti Haikonen is preferable because it is modelled on biological functionality, creating better analogues of living beings than previous efforts in AI. By creating associative networks of neurons which establish connections between stimuli and their effects on the robot’s body, it is able to learn what a stimulus means for its continued functioning. By using signals representing analogues of pain and pleasure, emotional information learned by the robot is grounded on how stimuli impact the robot’s body. This architecture provides a foundation for empathy since the robot is able to appeal to its own experiences of pain and pleasure to understand the meanings of behavioural cues exhibited by humans.

Daniel Dennett provides many compelling reasons to question the existence of phenomenal experiences in his paper titled Quining Qualia, however, from the perspective of the individual, qualia appear to be an inherent feature of consciousness. The act of reflecting on one’s experiences suggests that subjective feelings and sensations are a necessary element of human life, as personal opinions on various artistic works are apt to demonstrate. This paper argues that by considering subjective experiences from a naturalized functionalist perspective, a comprehensive explanation for qualia can be provided given its origins in evolutionary biology. As information passing through the nervous system, qualia serve to guide the behaviour of individuals to ultimately facilitate survival. Specifically, qualia are representations of environmental features, existing as information messages supported by neural physiology and encoded in electrochemical formats. In addition to addressing the Hard Problem of Consciousness and clarifying the four properties Dennett associates with qualia, this theoretical foundation enables further metaphysical discussion on the nature of consciousness more generally. Although many outstanding questions on the contents of subjective experiences are apt to linger given the explanatory gap, a robust theory for the existence of qualia can be developed through the integration of ideas and concepts from a variety of domains.