Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

424 THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS Safe Passage to the Future 425
Your task would be made much more difficult if you couldn't count on
your robot's being the only such robot around with such a mission. Let us
suppose that, in addition to whatever people and other animals are up and
about during the centuries to come, there will be other robots, many dif-ferent
robots (and perhaps "plants" as well), competing with your robot for energy
and safety. (Why might such a fad catch on? Let's suppose we get irrefutable
advance evidence that travelers from another galaxy will arrive on our planet
in 2401. I for one would ache to be around to meet them, and if cold storage
was my only prospect, I'd be tempted to go for it.) If you have to plan for
dealing with other robotic agents, acting on behalf of other clients like
yourself, you would be wise to design your robot with enough sophistication
in its control system to permit it to calculate the likely benefits and risks of
cooperating with other robots, or of forming alliances for mutual benefit. You
would be most unwise to suppose that other clients will be enamored of the
rule of "live and let live"—there may well be inexpensive "parasite" robots
out there, for instance, just waiting to pounce on your expensive contraption
and exploit it. Any calculations your robot makes about these threats and
opportunities would have to be "quick and dirty"; there is no foolproof way
of telling friends from foes, or traitors from promise-keepers, so you will
have to design your robot to be, like a chess-player, a decision-maker who
takes risks in order to respond to time pressure.
The result of this design project would be a robot capable of exhibiting
self-control of a high order. Since you must cede fine-grained real-time
control to it once you put yourself to sleep, you will be as "remote" as the
engineers in Houston were when they gave the Viking spacecraft its autonomy
(see chapter 12). As an autonomous agent, it will be capable of deriving
its own subsidiary goals from its assessment of its current state and the
import of that state for its ultimate goal (which is to preserve you till 2401).
These secondary goals, which will respond to circumstances you cannot
predict in detail (if you could, you could hard-wire the best responses to
them), may take the robot far afield on century-long projects, some of which
may well be ill-advised, in spite of your best efforts. Your robot may embark
on actions antithetical to your purposes, even suicidal, having been
convinced by another robot, perhaps, to subordinate its own life mission to
some other.
This robot we have imagined will be richly engaged in its world and its
projects, always driven ultimately by whatever remains of the goal states that
you set up for it at the time you entered the capsule. All the preferences it
will ever have will be the offspring of the preferences you initially endowed
it with, in hopes that they would carry you into the twenty-fifth century, but
that is no guarantee that actions taken in the light of the robot's descendant
preferences will continue to be responsive, directly, to your
best interests. From your selfish point of view, that is what you hope, but this
robot's projects are out of your direct control until you are awakened. It will
have some internal representation of its currently highest goals, its summum
bonum, but if it has fallen among persuasive companions of the sort we have
imagined, the iron grip of the engineering that initially designed it will be
jeopardized. It will still be an artifact, still acting only as its engineering
permits it to act, but following a set of desiderata partly of its own devising.
Still, according to the assumption we decided to explore, this robot will
not exhibit anything but derived intentionality, since it is just an artifact,
created to serve your interests. We might call this position "client centrism"
with regard to the robot: / am the original source of all the derived meaning
within my robot, however far afield it drifts. It is just a survival machine
designed to carry me safely into the future. The fact that it is now engaged
strenuously in projects that are only remotely connected with my interests,
and even antithetical to them, does not, according to our assumption, endow
any of its control states, or its "sensory" or "perceptual" states, with genuine
intentionality. If you still want to insist on this client centrism, then you
should be ready to draw the further conclusion that you yourself never enjoy
any states with original intentionality, since you are just a survival machine
designed, originally, for the purpose of preserving your genes until they can
replicate. Our intentionality is derived, after all, from the intentionality of
our selfish genes. They are the Unmeant Meaners, not us!
If this position does not appeal to you, consider jumping the other way.
Acknowledge that a fancy-enough artifact—something along the lines of
these imagined robots—can exhibit real intentionality, given its rich functional
embedding in the environment and its prowess at self-protection and
self-control. 10 It, like you, owes its very existence to a project the goal of
10. In the light of this thought experiment, consider an issue raised by Fred Dretske
(personal communication) with admirable crispness: "I think we could (logically ) create
an artifact that acquired original intentionality, but not one that (at the moment of
creation, as it were) had it." How much commerce with the world would be enough to
turn the dross of derived intentionality into the gold of original intentionality? This is our
old problem of essentialism, in a new guise. It echoes the desire to zoom in on a crucial
moment and thereby somehow identify a threshold that marks the first member of a
species, or the birth of real function, or the origin of life, and as such it manifests a failure
to accept the fundamental Darwinian idea that all such excellences emerge gradually by
finite increments. Notice, too, that Dretske's doctrine is a peculiar brand of extreme
Spencerism: the current environment must do the shaping of the organism before the
shape "counts" as having real intentionality; past environments, filtered through the
wisdom of engineers or a history of natural selection, don't count—even if they result in
tne very same functional structures. There is something wrong and something right in
this. More important than any particular past history of individual appropriate commerce