Progress is being made in the field of feedback and tactile sensors which allow a robot to sense their actions and adjust their behaviour accordingly. This is vital to enable robots to perform complex physical tasks that require some active control in response to the situation.Some scientists believe that robots will be able to approximate human-like intelligence in the first half of the 21st century. The cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener discussed the issue of robots replacing humans in fields of work in his book The human use of human beings (1950), in which he speculated that robots taking over human jobs may initially lead to growing unemployment and social turmoil, but that in the medium-term it might bring increased material wealth to people in most nations. Human perception and acceptance of robots has been considered and has led to the proposition of the Uncanny Valley in analyzing human feelings about robots.
                                                http://www.answers.com/topic/robot

In this essay I initially outline what is usually meant when the word ‘mind’ is ordinarily used in natural language, and what is meant by the word when it is employed by psychologists, philosophers, scientists and others involved in the study of the human brain or artificial intelligence.

I will then go on to argue for the non-necessity and non-existence of ‘Mind’ as an extraneous ontological duality of the brain, and offer my views as to the essential non-reductivity and non– intertheoreticality of the concept of ‘mind’ and the necessity for a complete elimination of the myth of ‘mind’ as being counter-productive to a modern understanding of human cognition.

By the term ‘intertheoreticality’ I mean the practice of rephrasing or reshaping a description of some older theory by means of describing it or redefining it in another form. Thus to rename soul to 'mind' or salt to sodium chloride does not alter the import of the meaning of the word nor metaphysical nature of the concept nor the chemical composition of the compound. In a similar way for a functionalist whose notions are rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, [1] to redescribe the age-old dualistic notion of ‘mind’ as something that exists in the form of a non-physical substance - to something which depends not on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays does not alter anything other than describing the way it works rather than the way it is entitically. [1. Levin. 2006]

The essay will end is a summing-up or conclusion in which I will draw together all the various argumentative strands and offer my opinion as to why in the twenty-first century the notion of 'mind' should even remain as an issue or subject of philosophical exploration, and why it has not sunk out of favour as a concept along with similar myths like phlogiston, the flat earth, the geocentric universe, humours and homunculi, the acquisition of virtues through cannibalism, telegony and tailed men and other misbegotten peculiarities of human misunderstanding. As Patricia Churchland points out to dualists:

There is widespread disagreement in the domain of the Philosophy of 'Mind' and the science of Robotics between the concept of an incorporeal 'mind' and the intelligent material meatiness of the human brain or the metal and silicone components of a robot, with the subsequent ability to gather information, process, understand, retrieve, profit and change existential modes from its sensorial experience of the world.

The foregoing are practical matters concerning the registration of material change in identifiable objects on the one hand and the transcendentalist, ideas of ‘mind’ on the other, which is a spiritualistic and basically non-scientific concept. As my own neuro-physiological and neuro-philosophical position is one that rejects the very idea of 'mind' in general, it follows that I also reject the concept of human or robotic 'minds' in particular.

In common parlance the 'mind' is taken to be the whereabouts of the faculty of reason, the seat of our inherent cognitive or perceptual powers which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings.

The ontological question which we are concerned with in the philosophy of 'mind' whether we are addressing the human or the robotic 'mind' is really the so-called 'mind'-body problem. Those dualist philosophers who attempt to reduce so-called 'mental states' to neurobiological states claim that the brain produces subjective experiences that in turn can affect the brain, though they are not in themselves identifiable with any properties of the brain itself.

If one questions the mechanism by which the admittedly non-existent 'mind' is joined, connected or brought to bear on the material meatiness that is the brain they fall silent. It is as if we asked a carter how one could connect a horse to a non-existent waggon, or a sailor to explain how he would go about tying-up a ship to the quayside with a non-existent rope.

Dualism responds that our ‘mental states’ are states of a non-physical substance. They seem oblivious to the fact that the terms 'physical' and 'substance' are interchangeable words for 'that which has mass and occupies space.' So the expression: 'non-physical substance' is a contradiction in terms. Dualism does not provide any answers to more specific questions about the nature of the so-called 'mind,' such as precisely where it is located? How it manages to remain extant during the course of our lifetime if it has no means to absorb sustenance or no blood vessels to be re-oxygenated etc?

Using for example the qualia of pain as an example of a mental state, Behaviourism sidesteps our question in a word, namely: 'behaviour.' For them what is common to all pains in virtue of which they are pains, for example, is that people respond to pain by tending to act alike. This is interesting but irrelevant to the question – for the question of ‘mind’ is a question of 'mind' – brain or 'mind'– body connectivism and not what the observed results of an unexplained ‘mind'-body connectivist assumption involve.

The question as to what process is involved which enables pain to become joined or united or linked to ’mind’ or how the pained physical object [say a finger hit with a hammer] with the 'mind' state of registering and feeling the pain which results in all people acting alike? A learning ‘mind’ able to process actionable knowledge) would need to be concentrated on associating particular informational data, and the for the connections that allow us to gain knowledge or skills are more are more important than our current state of knowing – hence the demise of the Neanderthal.

Identity Theory claims that neurophysiology is what all pains share that makes them pains. To be in pain is to have one's C-fibres firing. This neatly avoids the question of how the materially existent meaty C-fibres are connected with the non-existent substance that is claimed to be the 'mind' or consciousness that records the pain.

Using the same example of pain we discover that Functionalism says that what all pains share in virtue of which they are pains is their functional role--namely, their relation to inputs, outputs, and other functionally defined mental states. Again there is no attempt by functionalists to explain the vitally important ontological explanation as to how the functional input of the physically meaty toe's change of existing from that of a healthy whole toe to that of a damaged toe pierced by a three inch nail is converted into a non-existent 'mental state' of some non-existent 'mind.’

Once again to address the question: Do Robots have 'Minds?’ directly my answer is no. Robots do not and never will have 'minds' no matter how ingeniously they are developed by their human creators. Even if their human creators succeeded in such a faithful replication of such humanoids that they were so perfect as to be virtual copies of humans they would never have ‘minds', because their human engineers have no ’minds’ to be copied, emulated or simulated. Like there are conscious (aware)  humans there will one day be sensorially aware robots or humanoids but ‘consciousness’ itself does not exist. There may well be ‘mindful robots’ as indeed there are ‘mindful human beings,' but that does not mean that a ’mind’ exists which is linked to the meaty or metal bits by some inexplicable chain of metaphysical conjunction or co-occurrence. The bottom line?  

   

                                           

To return to my introduction. Why in the twenty-first century the notion of 'mind' should even remain as an issue or subject of philosophical exploration? My answer to that question might well form the subject of a separate essay, but in short I believe it is because so much of our traditional belief has been invested in the idea. Religion for example does not take kindly to the idea that the ‘mind’ does not exist, for ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are inextricably linked in theological doctrine. So too with the enormous ‘psychology industry’ with a turnover in the United States of billions of dollars annually. Much of medical psychiatry still accepts the notion of 'mind', although it pragmatically relies almost completely upon treatment by drugs and chemicals that affect the material tissue of the embodied brain and not some notional non-existent ‘mind.’ There conclusion for me is obvious. If no such connection exists between the non-existent human or robotic 'mind' then anything which is aid to exist or to be actual which is dependent on such a non-existent ‘mind’ itself does not exit. Therefore so-called ‘qualia’ do not exist. What exists is the painful finger or toe, the conscious human mentating robot – but though it may seem counter-intuitive – ‘pain, consciousness, and mentation do not exist in the world – what exists is the pained human being.

The bottom line? For me counter-intuitiveness and the habit of challenging preconception are important additions to any philosopher’s tool-kit. My experience tells me that reasoning and empirical observation are vastly superior and more reliable than opinion arrived at through a vague idea in which some confidence is placed that humans have ‘minds' and that one day perhaps robots might have ‘minds’ too.