Consciousness and the Social Brain

conscious computer.
    Given that Deep Blue was programmed to win at chess and that Watson was programmed to win at Jeopardy, I am certain a computer system could be designed and programmed to construct a rich, complex model of attentional state. A computer that can attribute consciousness to others and to itself should be possible. My guess is that by combining the technologies that already exist, and by working along the lines indicated by the attention schema theory, a team of dedicated people with good funding should be able to build an uncannily human-like consciousness within about a decade. If the project is not tackled with quite as much energy or funding as Deep Blue or Watson, then I’m sure it will take longer than a decade. But I consider the outcome to be not only possible but inevitable. We will build computers that can construct their own awareness in the same way that the human brain does.
    Conscious computers would have the same usefulness as conscious humans. They would be easier for humans to interact with. Since we are exquisitely good at social interaction, since we tend to think and operate through our social intelligence, a socially intelligent computer, a computer with consciousness that could join the network of minds around it, would make for an effective SUI (social user interface).
    Judging once again from popular novels and movies, the science fiction crowd may tend to envision a conscious computer as a machine that can deceive, manipulate, cause sociopolitical cataclysm, take over the world, and generally kill off humanity. None of these properties are desirable. I suggest, however, that megalomania and villainy have nothing to do with the question of consciousness. A dangerous marauding computer could exist perfectly well without awareness. And an aware computer could be a useful tool, just as modern computers are, without malevolently choosing on its own to kill off anything.
Can Consciousness Survive the Death of the Brain?

    What does the present theory imply about life after death?
    The theory certainly has no room for a spirit that floats free of the body. Consciousness depends on a brain or some other computer constructing it. When the computer goes down, the computations cease. There is one common way, however, in which our conscious minds effectively survive the death of the brain.
    Imagine editing a document on a computer. That document file is data on a software platform on the hardware platform of the computer. Suppose you copy the file to a memory stick. Then the computer crashes. The hard drive breaks catastrophically and irreparably. Since you saved your work, you don’t mind very much. You put the memory stick in another computer, copy the file, and return to work. You never stop to worry that, strictly speaking, it is not the same file. The old file has died. What you now have is a copy. Since all the important information has been transferred, you are satisfied.
    In the attention schema theory, the social machinery in my brain constructs an informational model of a conscious mind, a quirky, idiosyncratic model that is my understanding of myself and my attentive relationship to the rest of the world.
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+ World. The propertyof awareness is a part of that informational model. The model is what I call my conscious mind. It is information constructed and manipulated on neuronal circuitry. Can that file be copied from my brain to a similar device and run?
    Not at high fidelity. I lack a data port in my head and therefore, alas, have no way to copy the information in any detail. But I can make a rough copy. I can spend time with a friend. If I spend enough time and my friend gets to know me well, then he will construct a model in his own brain, an informational model of a mind filled with the quirks and idiosyncracies that reflect me. His model of my mind will be the same general type of data run in the same general manner on the same general hardware architecture as my own conscious mind. It will be a copy, at low resolution, of my consciousness. In effect, I will have been copied over from one computer to another.
    I have in my brain a rich, detailed, working model of my grandmother, who has been dead for twenty years now. I can run that model and imagine her voice, her body language, her probable reactions in this or that situation, her emotional tone. She comes to life again in my inner experience. That informational model of a mind, run in my brain, is a