ABSTRACT
Given our objectives, the problem of consciousness for us, put colorfully, is this: How can we engineer things so that a certain zombie — Brutus1, and, in fact, all future incarnations of the Brutus architecture — becomes a member of the literati? A less lively form of the question is: How can we build Brutus1 so that despite his lack of consciousness he can generate stories rich in consciousness — so rich that those who read them are inclined to ascribe genuine states of mind to Brutus1? Or put yet another way: How can something lacking a mind write compelling fiction about minds? (What Portia says about Shakespeare’s Brutus — that his mind is afflicted — cannot be said about Brutus or Brutus1: they have no minds!) In this chapter we explain why we see these questions as the toughest ones facing those who aim to build genuinely creative agents (in the literary realm), and we provide the first phase of an answer. The second phase, more closely tied to actual implementation, is presented in Chapter 6.
