The emancipation of the drone: a Dennettian thought experiment

This paper presents an extended thought experiment conducted by Daniel Dennett and the author as a way of exploring how consciousness might develop without a central “Cartesian Theater.” The starting point is a system with a real Cartesian Theater – a drone remotely piloted by a human sitting at a monitor. The imaginative exercise involves the removal of the human operator and their gradual replacement by onboard systems, emancipating the drone from external control. Following Braitenberg’s “law of uphill analysis and downhill invention,” the rebuilding proceeds by bottom-up engineering rather than top-down design and makes use of various tricks and shortcuts. Six iterations of the drone are described, in which it acquires basic capacities for recognition and response, learning, imagination, metacognition, communication, and, finally, autostimulation – the ability to process its own verbal reports. This final development allows the drone to access its own internal response patterns, giving it the sense of having an inner life with qualities that resist explanation. The resulting sketch thus not only illustrates how consciousness could be achieved without a Cartesian Theater but also shows how the process might naturally create the illusion of such a theater.