Church-Turing Lovers

Church-Turing Lovers are sex robots that attain every functionality of a human lover, at the desired level of granularity. Yet they have no first-person consciousness—there is “nobody home.” When such a lover says, “I love you,” there are all the intentions to please you, even computer emotions. Would you care whether your significant other is a Church-Turing Lover? Does one care about one’s lover only insofar as his/her functionalities are involved, or does one care how the lover feels. Church-Turing Lovers demonstrate how even epiphenomenal experience provides reasons to care about other people’s first-person consciousness. In a related argument, I propose the notion of the Uncanny Valley of Perfection. I systematize the standards for humanoid robots as follows: minimally humanoid (teddy bears); bottom of the Uncanny Valley (repulsive sex dolls); Silver Standard (almost human-looking), Gold Standard (hard to distinguish from humans at the right level of granularity); Platinum Standard (slightly improved on humans); the Uncanny Valley of Perfection (too much better than humans); the Slope of the Angels (no longer humanoid, viewed with awe).