> > Very well. If the drawbacks I suggested are actually an integral part of the good dog experience for whatever reason, assume then that the robodog *does* exhibit them. Why, then, would he be a poor substitute for a meatdog? Seems to me he'd be functionally identical in every respect.
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> That would probably be a big improvement, but I think the "knowledge of consciousness" argument from my previous post still applies. I think there would be a lot of people out there for whom such a robodog would suffice, but my guess is that, for a majority, the knowledge that the dog is actually a machine is going to be the deal-breaker.

I believe this would be true for you, and probably a lot of other people, but *my* guess is that this objection would slowly go away over time. I don't think robodogs will ever completely replace meatdogs, if only because some people will want an "authentic" dog no matter what. Just look at the problem synthetic diamonds are having in the marketplace. We have the technology now to create completely perfect synthetic diamonds that are indistinguishable from "real" diamonds (they *are*, in point of fact, "real" diamonds in every sense of the word *except* for the fact that they were created in a laboratory and not dug out of the ground) and yet a lot of people reject them because they somehow think that diamonds dug out of the ground by slave labor in Africa are "better".

But, back to robodogs, think about children raised in a household with one of these hypothetical robodogs. I simply cannot imagine them not bonding with a perfect facsimile of a dog the same way they would with a real meatdog. Children bond with inanimate stuffed animals that only vaugely look like animals, and even with freaking favorite blankets that have no resemblance to anything living at all. I simply can't see them *not* bonding with a robodog of sufficient quality. And that person will grow up totally accepting the robodog as their pet, uncaring that their pet is not a "real dog".

Sure, part of the process would depend on how their parents taught them to respond to the dog, and how their interactions were either encouraged or discouraged. If the child was raised to think of the robodog as a machine and not a companion, then there might be a difference. But I see the type of people who would even buy a robodog for their child as the type who wouldn't worry about Johnny bonding with a "machine". Heck, they'd probably feel better about it, knowing that they're never going to have to sit Johnny down one day and tell him Rover is old and is going to die, or that Rover got hit by the school bus this morning or whatever (whether *this* is a good thing or not is another debate entirely.)

So I can understand where you're coming from, and believe a lot of people would share your objections, but I don't think this would really be a deal breaker for everyone. And I suspect that eventually, the "taboo" of bonding with a "machine" would soften and disappear for a lot of people. For me, life is as life does. If the robodog is so convincing at "simulating" a real dog that I can't tell the difference between the two, how can I possibly say that one is more alive than the other? Sure, one has a fabricated brain running some ultra-complex software, and one has an organic brain running some perhaps still undecipherable software, but both of them behave identically. I can't possibly say that just because I have a complete understanding of what the robodog's brain is doing that it is somehow less alive than the real dog. Just because the meatdog's brain is still a mystery to me doesn't make it somehow more worthy than the robodog's fabricated brain.

I don't think consciousness is magic, or something that requires biology in some way. I'm glad we're talking dogs here and not people, because if we were talking people this would inevitably end up as a religious discussion about souls, and I don't want to get into that. But I'm pretty sure you don't believe dogs have souls, so I don't think either of us think that doggie consciousness has a supernatural component to it. So given that doggie consciousness is something completely based in the physical realm, most likely associated with a dog's brain, how can one say that once we get to the point where we can create dogs that look and act identically to real dogs that we *haven't* created consciousness?

-- Dave