Neuropsychology

Starfarers, Prologue.

"'...it will be humans, not machines who go to the stars.'

"'If machines do not become as intelligent as humans, or more so.'

"'That will never happen. I know some neuropsychology. Consciousness, creative thought, that is not merely a business of electrons in circuits.'" (p. 15)

We can describe electrons and circuits fully without ascribing consciousness to them. But what then is consciousness? "Neuropsychology" must mean the study of neurons and of consciousness and of the relationship between them but what is that relationship? The second speaker continues:

"'It is something the entire living human organism does.'" (ibid.)

It is but that still does not tell us how consciousness originates. It is a qualitative change caused by but not reducible to a large number of quantitative changes. Why does one quantitatively measured wavelength cause the experience of the quality "red" and another wavelength cause us to see "blue"?

Is it impossible in principle for artifacts to become as complex and sensitive as living human organisms and, as part of this, to become conscious? In Poul Anderson's Genesis, conscious post-organic intelligences, not human beings, go to the stars. Anderson addresses every alternative.