| dc.description.abstract | In this chapter I will primarily address three questions. First, if we assume, as several futurists
profess to believe (Kurzweil 1999, 142-148; Levy 2008, 22; Pew Research Center 2014, 19), that
within a few decades we will be able to build robots that do all the things that we would normally
expect a real human lover and sexual companion to do, and that do them just as well, will they then
also be, as lovers and companions, as satisfying as a real person would - or will we have reason to
think or feel that something is amiss, that they are, in some way, not as good? To answer this
question, I shall assume that those robots will not be real persons, by which I mean that although
they may give the impression of being a person, they are in fact not persons. A person, as I am
using the term here, is a being that is both self-aware and self-concerned. A being is self-aware if
there is (to use Nagel’s felicitous phrase) something it is like to be that being, and it is selfconcerned
if it matters to it what happens in the world, and especially what happens to it. A real
person is a being that does not merely appear to be self-aware and self-concerned, by showing the
kind of behaviour that we have learned to expect from a self-aware and self-concerned being, but
one that really is self-aware and self-concerned. A being that only behaves as if it were a person,
without being one, I shall call a pseudo-person. [...] | en_GB |
