Slashdot Mirror
Ray Kurzweil Wonders, Can Machines Ever Have Souls?
Celery writes "There's an interview with Ray Kurzweil on silicon.com talking up the prospects of gene therapy as a means to reverse human aging, discussing different approaches to developing artificial intelligence, and giving his take on whether super intelligent machines could ever have souls.
From the interview: 'The soul is a synonym for consciousness ... and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul — there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property.'"
See subject.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
and in other news, yes, androids do dream of electric sheep.
i just don't understand the urge to anthropormorphize machines. although i will resist the urge to philosophize on the issue at length here.
Sorry, but there is absolutely no current *firm* definition of 'soul' or even 'consciousness' that we can use to even begin putting together this problem, let alone an answer to it. A machine may indeed have a 'soul' or 'consciousness', but it may be completely different to what we have, or what a dog has etc.
This i8s a blatant ploy by Kurzwall to give more power to the Pope and his minions: part of the nefarious Italian conspiracy to rule America through computer-generated mind-control devices. Americans! Defend your hot dogs! Say no to salami!
#
Access Denied.
# sudo
Starting Soul...
More
Non sequitur. It would very likely have an emergent property, but nothing requires that it be the same, or similar, to properties that emerge in biological systems.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Do Humans have one?
If so, anything else can.
Unless someone has a proof otherwise.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
is not 'of this world'. Science will take ages before they'll realise the basic truths described in countless religious and new-age texts that we've had for centuries..
Isn't the whole theory of consciousness rather self-hosting. We think we are, therefore we think and we are.
To me it seems much more plausible that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, a tool that makes us feel and appear "aware" because this is useful in a social species.
As for "souls", is it not preposterous to search for this in people, let alone boxes of chips? There is no need to invent some supernatural energy form in order to fully explain the behavior of humans. Nor machines.
It seems incredibly obvious that there's nothing more to us than ourselves. Nothing leaves us when we die. Consciousness is simply the emergent behaviour of our very complex bodies. I'm sure the god-bothers will cling on for a while but there's no god of any variety and we're steadily proving that.
Even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The religious will argue that a soul is something unique to mankind, embued by whichever creator their faith believes in, making it impossible for machines to ever have soul.
The athiests will argue that there's no such thing as a "soul", only sentience and/or self-awareness.
Others will meander aimlessly between the two.
If slashdot doesn't want to create an official category for stories hyping technologies that seem somehow always to be that elusive 10-20 years away (eg robust A.I., fusion power, widespread adoption of fuel cells, anything Ray Kurzweil ever says not involving synthesizers), we need to agree on a good tag for it.
Candidates for such a tag include: "bs" "decade" "neverhappen" but I know we can find the right one in ten years or less if we just work together.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
I can experience my own consciousness - therefore it is most certainly of this world.
Maybe you're thinking of a 'soul' in its generally understood sense - in which case your are nearly right, science will never realise these basic 'truths' as science is restricted by not being allowed to make shit up.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
We don't even know if humans have souls so what's the point of speculating over machines?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I always thought that the notion of soul is in the realm of religion. No one in scientific community uses the term.
So let's see what the people who invented the term say what it is:
From Catholic encyclopedia:
"The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated. The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well. That our vital activities proceed from a principle capable of subsisting in itself, is the thesis of the substantiality of the soul: that this principle is not itself composite, extended, corporeal, or essentially and intrinsically dependent on the body, is the doctrine of spirituality."
So according to this, anything that thinks, has a "mind" and is conscious (never found a satisfying definition for that word by the way), should have a soul.
This means that all animals have a soul. However, according to Catholic doctrine only humans have immortal soul :D.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Before we talk about computers, let's talk about ourselves. Do humans have souls?
I don't the answer is clear, and I personally lean towards saying that we don't.
Yes Given "The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning." -Albert Einstein Since he seems to be saying a soul is nothing more then the data collected by our senses and remembered. I submit, every learning application ever has a soul. Since it has reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, therefor fits the definition given above.
can we make machines believe that they do?
Any system that's sufficiently complex will display behavior similar to our own. When machines eventually display incontrovertible evidence of self-awareness, rational humans will be forced to either admit that the machines do indeed have souls, or humans do not.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
That's the point of putting an article on slashdot : to start a discussion about it. I'm skeptical like you, but not totally adverse to Prolegomena on a boring day.
I think the soul is a delusion caused by the brain to make you forget you're a cog in the machine/anthill/whatever. "Yeah, yeah, you're a fucking snowflake". Three modes of behavior, Bitch, Lord, or Independant, gender is irrelevant. We can code that, can't we? ;)
what if we want to say no to salami and hot dogs? *pulls the foil off of his hamburger, makes a hat, and gives it to AC*
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Sure, it's imaginable, but the human brain is a whole lot more complicated than anything we've built so far. Once we have a 100 billion node computer cluster with ~7000 network cards per node, then we might see something interesting resembling recognizable consciousness/soul activity. Simulations will never approach the genius of inspiration or the variety of activities that a real brain can do.
stuff |
We understand how the muscles work. We know that if they act one way or the other, the person's leg will move one way or the other.
We don't understand how the neurons interact with each other. The consciousness is the sum of the work of those cells we don't understand. So,
there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen.
This seems rather obvious.
And then, you say 'maybe we can give this thing we don't know what is and we don't know for sure how to define for robots'. Ok, maybe. Maybe there's a FSM above us judging our actions. Maybe.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
echo 'Cogito ergo sum'; //I think therefore I am
By Descartes' reasoning, any machine that executes that code exists at least as a thinking thing (a consciousness)
Or we could also take the python route and simply;
import soul
I do believe Ghost in the Shell addressed this partially during 1st GIG, and then in 2nd GIG towards the end it was pretty much without a doubt that they could. When the Tachikoma's realize they have to sacrifice themselves to save all those people + Section 9 and then actually do it, so sad :(
He claims (very complex system) + (can reflect on itself) => consciousness.
What does "reflect" mean here? One way we commonly us it: "If I can reflect on myself, I am conscious." Certainly that can't be what he means since it would be circular - being able to reflect simply is being conscious, so does not explain consciousness.
Perhaps he means "reflect" in some simpler, non-conscious way. We could picture a video camera focusing on a mirror showing the video camera. No consciousness there, right, even with a very good camera? Now let's make the camera part of a very complex system - say we hook it up to the Internet, whose complexity equals all the devices and interconnections currently attached (but presumably not the human beings sitting at those devices, since that again brings in consciousness, which is what we're trying to explain).
Is your webcam conscious if it's focused on a mirror showing itself? Or more properly put, does it make the consciousness of the Internet emerge? Or is this just the wrong sort of "reflection," with the wrong sort being any sort which isn't conscious to begin with?
Face it. He's explained nothing. Consciousness can't be done with mirrors, no matter how complex a thing you put in front of them. If the consciousness isn't already there, no mirror can make it emerge.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I think the soul is a delusion caused by the brain to make you forget you're a cog in the machine/anthill/whatever.
I think its a concept invented by religions to create something about you that you can't see, which can be saved by some 'divine entity' that by coincidence, you can't see either, and they control. Or at least control access to.
Apparently this process also involves giving them money, I get fuzzy on the details.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Bart: You shank! How could you tell on me?
Milhouse: Well I don't want hungry birds pecking my soul forever.
Bart: Soul? Come on, Milhouse, there is no such thing as a soul.
It's just something they made up to scare kids, like the
bogeyman, or Michael Jackson.
Milhouse: But every religion says there's a soul, Bart. Why would they
lie? What would they have to gain?
[Lovejoy, in his office, works a change sorting machine]
Lovejoy: I don't hear scrubbing!
Bart: Well, if your soul is real, where is it?
Milhouse: [motions to his chest] It's kind of in here. And when you
sneeze, that's your soul trying to escape. Saying "God bless
you" crams it back in! [gestures up his nose] And when you
die, it squirms out and flies away.
Bart: Uh huh. What if you die in a submarine at the bottom of the
ocean?
Milhouse: Oh, it can swim. It's even got wheels in case you die in the
desert and it has to drive to the cemetery.
Bart: [sighs] Oh, how can someone with glasses that thick be so
stupid? Listen: you don't have a soul, I don't have a soul,
there's no such thing as a soul!
in silicon...
How much energy would be required? Our brains run on about 20 Watts.
Deleted
He doesn't even address the question about soul, he addresses the question of consciousness. Not the same thing. His answer presupposes that there is no such thing as a soul, no creative spark, only emerging properties of complex systems. That is a very narrow and pessimistic view. A person with that sort of view might as well just crawl away to die, what would be the point of going on?
your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through
Historically, the way we've discovered what part of the brain does what first is by running into someone with an abnormal part of their brain. The visual cortex, hippocampus, etc. So far though, no one has shown up that lacks consciousness.
Now I suppose that would be by a lot of definitions "brain dead", since consciousness is akin to being awake or dreaming, but still we haven't ran into someone that for example, had a brain tumor or took a nailgun to the head that hit a key area that put their lights out for good, on a consistent basis for that area of the brain.
Now not every location in the brain is highly localized. For example, the area of the motor cortex that controls speech is known, roughly, but it varies slightly from person to person. It's likely that consciousness is a highly distributed function of the brain. That's going to make it a lot harder to study.
I think the whole idea of referring to consciousness as an "emergent property" boils down to our not understanding what causes it, multiplied by it seeming to require a highly complex system to support in the first place.
100 years ago if you'd have presented a mathematician with a laptop with Mathematica loaded on it, he'd probably consider it sentient.
My personal take on it is that consciousness is the brain constantly considering a myriad of possibilities, trying to determine their outcome/impact, in an effort to shape future events in a desirable way by adjusting our actions to try to achieve those outcomes. This is a brute force search, and requires the insanely massive parallelism the brain is designed for. Until we can build a system capable of parallelism on that level, we will not have a "conscious" machine. Everything else before that is a fake, trying to cheat that basic requirement by using shortcuts through linear processing. Simple organisms we don't consider sentient behave exactly as we'd expect a linear system to, directly reacting in a predictable way to provided stimulus, with no ability to learn. Learning is the process of tweaking the values used to consider past events, in order to alter present behavior, to achieve a more desirable outcome in the future. Learning and consciousness go hand in hand.
You can see the middleground in a lot of less complex animals. Give a reasonably advanced animal a tool and a reward achievable by proper use of the tool, and they will play with the tool, experimenting with different way to use it until they get lucky and get the reward. Then it quickly becomes easier and easier for them because they've learned to use the tool. That's the "considering the possibilities" done live and with the tool, which may be most of what people consider "thinking" or "consciousness". I believe what "separates us from them" is that we can do this consideration without having the tool in hand. We can imagine future use of the tool and work out in advance what we need to do with it, or to at least select the proper tool in advance. If you give a monkey a toolbox full of tools it may take them some time experimenting to figure out which tool is the right one to loosen the screw to open the box with the banana in it. Maybe this "imagination" is a third ingredient?
Even after we get the parallelism problem solved, there's the matter of the wiring. Evolution has lead brains to be preprogramed to do both the learning and the consideration, and that may turn out to be a tough system to figure out and duplicate. Or it may be pathetically simple. Best guess here is we will get parallelism figured out, then learning, and the last hurdle will be the imagination behavior.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Soul is a bit of a loaded word. I guess we're talking about a sense of self awareness or an aspect of it. Which is something that is really not well understood. I know I have this sense but I can't prove it to you. I assume other people have this same feeling and suspect that my computer does not.
But I can't prove any of this. So how can we determine if a computer has a soul?
Heinlein already dealt with this in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Please get a job.
Sincerely,
Everyone
No. Would we ever talk about strong AI bullshit if it weren't for Kurzweil spouting his pipe dreams anyways? Everytime you hear about strong AI you hear Kruzweil's name. I know the guy has "mad geek credentials", but by now it should be very obvious that he's a strong AI zealot, and one of the very few at that. He should start his own apocalyptic cult.
You just got troll'd!
based off the standard Christian faith, Machines, just like animals, can not have souls.
They're trying to take your money so you can get into heaven. Remember Jesus says that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven.
Equating consciousness with a soul is certainly a huge leap in logic at best. Are we to believe that a person knocked unconscious whether temporarily or permanently suddenly loses his soul? I think that violates the fundamentals of every major religion that exists or has ever existed.
As there isn't any proof there is such a thing as a "soul", it is meaningless to speculate as to whether or not a machine can have one. Plus, there is the small fact that there is no agreed upon definition of what a soul is and what can have one.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
This is a loaded question to begin with. It assumes that a soul is actually something that is real to begin with. If you have a heart, it's easy to see, just reach inside and pull it out and you'll see that it's a pumping muscular mass. Same with your brain, just cut open your head and pull out a gray mass.
What doesn't exist however is ego, yet we do everything to protect it.
Ultimately the question comes to the realization that all we truly know about life is that it begins and ends and that's the extent of it.
Pondering a soul or an afterlife eventually becomes a pointless exercise. It's like being in a burning house and pondering the architect.
Perhaps a more interesting question is whether or not machine will be sentient. If a machine can ask or give compassion, then sure why not?
I like how he refers to the soul as "conciousness," which is in turn some "emergent property" of a "complex system." i.e. He doesn't have a fucking clue what a soul is. Specualtion: pointless. I do like him, though. H+ FTW!
If it looks like a soul, and it talks like it has a soul, I'd say it has a soul.
I don't find myself wishing machines had souls. Now, a sense of humor, that would be something worth wishing for, so would a conscience, but not a soul.
(Also wondering whether Ray Kurzweil has any of the above. Let's work on that one first.)
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
"Soul" is not a term that has a meaningful scientific definition. We don't know what it is, and people have wildly differing ideas about it, based on intuition, culture, religion.
You're not going to get meaningful investigation of whether a machine can have a soul unless you first define what you mean by soul. Quite a lot of what religion and culture tells us about souls is not supported by any science to date.
So I suspect the answer is likely "No, but then neither do we." and then with a bit further thought, very likely, "Whatever we can do with our brains, a machine can be built to do the same." And that's quite good enough.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
We already have systems with billions of transistors. Maybe not a soul, per se, but if properties simply "emerge" out of complexity, how come we're not seeing any other "lesser" properties yet?
(the ability to heat one's house with his CPU doesn't exactly qualify as an emergent property in this instance)
Computers already have souls - its their BIOS!
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Roger Zelazny already provided the artistic answer in "For a Breath I Tarry." My favorite short story.
Depending on how you define "soul", you could argue that machines are more likely to have souls. We're just meat, thinking meat, and once we die it's not provable that our consciousness can carry on. Machines, on the other hand, can more easily download their "mind" (if there is such a thing) to another vessel. They are, in essence, immortal.
So welcome our new immortal machine overlords.
We're machines, and *we have souls...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Surely you've read Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
He sold his soul a long time ago and is now forced to ask the same crap, unanswerable questions and make the same bombastic, unprovable assertions over and over again for the rest of his life. I think he got a book deal out of it and the amazing ability to get publications to pay attention to him even though he became old news about ten years ago.
'perpetual20', as in this is currently seen as being 20 years in the future, twenty years ago it was seen as being 20 years in the future, and in twenty years it will be seen as being 20 years in the future. No matter your point in time, the fruition date is perpetually 20 years away.
Someone else suggested 'flying cars', which is of course the perfect example of 'perpetual20'.
Sweet informative mod.
You amply demonstrated your lack of Quantum Anything and the PP called you on it. (Hint: "Observation" in the Quantum sense has nothing to do with humans nor consciousness nor souls or any such ill-defined concepts).
(Not the PP.)
My James Brown robot definitely has soul.
that we don't know how to identify a soul, what a soul is, where a soul is, if anyone actually has a soul, that is a very open question.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Consciousness is not an emergent property it's a bug ! Why would we want to reproduce such a mistake ? look all the trouble it lead us to (war, religion, finance, taxes, ...)
People have been asking this since the first little girl asked her daddy if their Dog Spot has a soul. I offer you this reader:
A father and a mother each have a soul. They have a child. Start you debate here.
If the soul is bestowed upon the child by a divine being, then the divine being may just as likely bestow a garbage can or a tree a soul at it's (the divine being in charge) discretion. So there is no restriction on a robot having a soul. From a Christian perspective, if God knows when even a sparrow falls then I'd wager he'd be on top of giving any robot that askes for a soul one with due haste. If God is the father that makes HAL God's grandkid.
If the soul is emergent, inherit in the child and develops as does conciousness then it is just as likely a soul would eventually emerge for any complex system. The universe itself may have a soul due to its complexity.
Once you have a given rule on the source of the soul then you can spend another lifetime debating what a soul is. As far as the original discussion though we come to the same answer every time:
From a spiritual aspect, where God can do anything and the soul is crafted by God, it can be bestowed upon anything at God's discretion thus a robot with a soul is not only probable, but would more then likely be expected.
From a scientific standpoint, there is no restriction on conciousness and self awareness by a mechanical or electronic system. As our brain, as complex as it is, is an organic machine. So from a scientific standpoint there doesn't appear to be a restriction on a soul in an robot or computer. This does though imply that there is a good chance your hamburger had a soul depending on it's level of awareness. Which then leads into the discussion of what level of sentience\awareness endows a person with a soul which then leads into a whole mess of crap ranging from animal right, abortion, and in the event of intelligent non-human life, the discussion of Sentient Rights (as human rights would be racist at that point.)
My head hurts, getting a blood mary, Cheers!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Machines do whatever they are programmed (intended or not) to do. If a conciousness appears somewhat, what it could do? alter the way it is already behaving, the way is programmed to do? We could be speaking about rocks conciousness too.
Same happens with human beings. You can't separate "soul" from physiology, because they are tied from the start, it is part of our brain wiring, as for machines must be somehow part of their programming.
Not all programming looks like deterministic, of course. Probably the biggest culprit of hope in this area is Windows (even evil conciousness is conciousness), but whatever emerges must be somewhat programmed with space for that.
Speaking about space for that, if i remember well in Asimov's Bicentennial Man (the story, not the movie) it "emerged" with artistic sense and things like that because by a building defect, it had the space for going beyond its programming.
What if the soul is an emergent property only of biological systems?
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Me thinks they have been watching Camron on the Sarah Connor Chronicles too much...
I meant shoo.
My spool checker mast have bean of.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I see soul more as the engine (brain) and results of its output. I.e. who we are through what we say, think or do.
At the moment I think that at one point it will be possible to emulate such, though it is way far ahead and depending on whether progress is allowed to continue into the future.
Personally I think that robotics are now where computers science was in the late 50-ties, and that A.I research is even further behind. It's a bit ironic that we half way expect to have solved these things in practically no time when mankind has used thousands of years to evolve.
It was a transplant from a skunk donor who volunteered for the procedure.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
to anything that can you can form an emotional attachment to
other human beings, certainly
pet dogs also
even if its just a particular beach you like, this can have a soul
we name oceangoing ships, the captain will refer to his boat as "she", and his emotions will be very much tied to what is essentially just a large hulk of wood or iron
all sorts of things can have a soul. and the only prerequisite is that someone feel an emotional attachment to it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
. . . and it's a black one: They do *exactly* what we tell them to do.
Regards;
Stop selling your snake oil bullshit and get a real job.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Consciousness is an emergent property of systems, but it is not a state transition where a system all of a sudden has consciousness.
A cruise control system in a car is "conscious" of the rate of the vehicle and the gear that the transmission is in. It is also conscious of the set point that the driver enters into the system. It then expresses a will (control signal) to seek this target velocity which is made manifest as an acceleration or deceleration.
This is no different than a human being expressing a will to pick up a soda with his arm because he is thirsty. There's a level of complexity involved, but consciousness is consciousness. Saying that a cell phone is not conscious is a convention and not a true category of being.
Soul, however, means "intrinsic identity"... Soul is a term that speaks to something intrinsically "this" about an object. It speaks to a religious attitude that exists in western mythology that puts us at odds with the world (i.e. we are here and the world is there). The soul of a table would be the thing about that table that is NOT something else. For example, the soul would be the part of the table separate from the paint and the wood and the bolts and brackets.
In eastern mythology, this notion is discarded. The core of all buddhisms, for example describe the concept of dependent origination which says that no things have intrinsic identity (i.e. when buddha describes "emptiness."). This means that things are entirely "extrinsically" defined. A table, under this notion, is the wood and the metal and the water that fed the tree that made the wood and the sunlight that evaporated that rain in an unending web of linked causations such that any one thing you want to call an "object" is an expression of all things and is, in no way, intrinsically identifiable.
Soul is not consciousness. Consciousness is a property of a computation system with feedback about its current state. To be "conscious" of one's intention is to be aware of it. It's to have information about a thing and to use that information to act. It's the basis of being human. Memories, desires, urges, vision, smell, touch, etc.. These are all coefficients in complex and noisy equations that produce a extraordinarily complex range of behaviors that interact with other humans in society to create another layer of richness, but there's nothing fundamentally different between this and a microprocessor hooked up to many peripherals in a PC and then hooked up to many PCs via the internet, etc.
There's nothing "unconscious" about your cell phone other than that egoism desire to create such a false dichotomy. Machines are already conscious... They just don't have programmed desires that are similar to ours or faces that look like ours.
I suppose one could define anything living as something with a soul. If you are actively attempting to survive -- humans, trees, frogs, bacteria -- then you could be defined as having a soul. But I would think having a soul would be, as stated, more towards consciousness and less towards natural tendencies (wolf's instinct, plant reaching for the sun, etc).
Something with a soul could be defined as something that is actively trying to survive, but may actively choose not to for some reason.
Such as, say, the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 at the end of Terminator 2. ;-)
Let's use the smallest creature universally recognized to be alive, perhaps a mycoplasm (the smallest class of bacteria).
I believe that relatively soon (within a generation) we'll be able to build this atom-by-atom. If you build this creature identically to a living organism, and then are (much more tricky) able to impart a collection of electrical charges precisely identical to the living model - will it be alive?
Then, if once this is possible, larger creatures are merely a matter of scale. ... something?
If you did this with a human model, what would you get? A living, breathing person? A vegetative humaniform
If there is something ELSE to the mix that we can't yet measure that gives something the actual characteristic of aliveness, that's the soul.
IMO.
-Styopa
Why not? Granted, our knowledge of neurobiology is not that advanced, so its certainly possible that consciousness does not require anything so novel as higher dimensions. But doesn't it seem strange to anyone else that a particular arrangement of atoms (our brain) can be aware?
I mean, it makes perfect sense that you could have a biological machine that is able to use senses and memory to make decisions on future actions. It can walk around and talk and appear quite human, but there is no need for there to be a true consciousness. There is no physical need for there to be a soul to experience existence.
Really all of this talk of consciousness as an emergent property of the brain is just a big guess because we have no freaking idea where consciousness comes from. If a brain is conscious, why isn't a rock, or a river? They are all just atoms. It doesn't make sense, but maybe it would if higher dimensions were involved.
The film "I, Robot" covered this subject in detail.
Will Smith took off his shirt and was all, "Whatup robot!" and then BLAM-O!!
the idea of a soul is synonymous with faith... with religion... and is generally considered to be a different thing from the body... immortal and unique. The part of the body that is the person, separate from the cells and fluids.
while you can argue all day long about heaven or reincarnation I doubt anyone is going to take up the fight that machines will go to heaven or be reincarnated. Clone, maybe... but then the 'soul' could also multiply, and whatever it is that someone is trying to label as a soul would be as non-unique as a calculator...
Rather obvious. In addition, it is not known whether consciousness is actually a property of the brain, or whether the brain is merely an interface device for something else. The oncludsion that consciousness is a property of the brain is non-scientific. The current established fact is that we have no clue at all, besides the sensors being attached to the brain are in part also available to the consciousness. In addition we know that while there seems to be genuine "free will", most people rarely use it and are generally emotion driven (animals have emotions too, so nothing special there) and do not even use interlectual capabilities that seem to be at least in part a feature of the brain. Quite frankly, seeing the how a lot of people behave, I would not be surprised to find out they actually do not have a consciousness at all or at least that it was not in control most of the time...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Vampires and demons and other nasties?
If in our culture, the soul was a synonym for consciousness, the loss of one's soul or the lack of a soul would require the lack of or loss of consciousness...
Deleted
The article was not about the 'soul' at all. Kurzweil switched to talking about consciousness right at the beginning (which was good since he is no philosopher).
When you ask people (at least the western folks) about where their soul is they will point to a different part of their body (the chest) than when you ask them about the consciousness or mind (the head). People don't perceive the soul and consciousness as being the same.
On top of that there are perfectly sane people attributing a 'soul' to an inanimate object even now. Just ask a musician about his Stradivari's or an architect about the Notre-Dame.
So what 'soul' are you talking about?
And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property.
Need I say more?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
-Edsger Dijkstra
Granted, "soul" is not the same thing as "intelligence", but the same simile works.
Here's the underlying problem. You cannot measure a "spiritual" property using a "physical" unit of measure. Consider that it is impossible to measure wind speed with a thermometer or discuss velocity in a unit of temperature such as Celsius. We have no known instruments or units of measure to observe or record a "spiritual" event, soul, etc. To suggest that it does not exist because no physical tools or units can be used to describe it would be wrong. Before we developed magnetometers we could see the effect of a magnetic field, but it was not possible to quantify, measure, or describe the magnetic field. Eventually we were able to create a unit of measure and a tool for measuring magnetic fields. Until we figure out a way to measure "spiritual" properties, it is impossible to confirm or deny their existence.
Kurzweil uses the word "soul" to get everyone's attention, then shifts the discussion to "consciousness". He *does* seem a bit obsessed with the idea of machine intelligence and its consequences.
At some point, though, we *are* likely to end up with self-aware machines, and the discussion of what that entitles them to will become relevant. Especially in the case of machines, where the consciousness could be transferable to fresh hardware as the original wears down.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Why should he when selling his technology religion keeps making money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I hope machines don't acquire a soul. Then they will spend their time endlessly debating whether they were intelligently designed or evolved and stop doing the things I ask them to do.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Consciousness is a brain function, and there is consciousness center in the brain. Has it ever happened to you to wake up but not be conscious for a brief moment in time? it has happened to a friend of mine: he woke up, got to the kitchen, started breakfast, but he was not conscious at the time. His wife talked to him, he replied...suddenly, he woke up, and realized he was in the kitchen. He did not remember how he got there.
This incident, and others I've heard and read, makes me believe that consciousness is a brain function. In the above case, this function was not activated at waking up time, but much later, but the person acted as usual.
I think the purpose of the consciousness function, regarding evolution, is to place the entity in the universe; the advantages of this higher function for evolution are obvious: if one realizes his/her/its place in the cosmos, it can act on a higher level to preserve his/her/its presence in it. The clear evidence for this is humans: they are dominating the planet as we speak.
I defer to the Killers on this:
For me, this is the issue that made Blade Runner so interesting and why Cameron is the most interesting character on Terminator: TSC Chronicles.
Anybody who has ever owned a classic, air-cooled VW knows the answer to this question is an unqualified yes.
my cat is sad that the existence of her 'soul' is not accepted by society at large.
Has anyone else actually seen the use of the word "emerging" in this context before? Surely it's an "emergent" property? I certainly can't find any examples of the use of "emerging" in this way via a quick google. Did Kurzweil use entirely the wrong word?
And I wonder, can anyone other than *me* ever have a soul?
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
If, as is implied here, "soul" and "consciousness" are a mere byproduct of a complex computing process, then it follows that they are deterministic. That is, for all their complexity, they still just process inputs into outputs by following predictable natural laws. Which means that any notion of "choice" is an illusion- the brain or AI can't "choose" anything anymore than mentos can "choose" to fiz in diet coke. Which has implications in law, ethics, and slashdot posts. Did Person A really _choose_ to kill Person B, or was he merely following the inputs into his system? Are you really _choosing_ to disagree with this post?
FTFS:
is... The people who "know" that we have a soul can't prove anything. The people who can "prove" we have a soul don't know anything.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
Well said. I'd like to add that the separation between consciousness and a simple computer is very likely the ability to "meta-think", that is, have synapse creation controlled by the synapses of other neurons. I've seen a couple of models for this (one likening neurons to amoebas using cAMP for signaling), but nothing that's close to AI...yet.
Additionally, it's easy to get confused over intelligence as the GP has; we have several hundred-thousand times more neurons in our brains than our computers do, each of them functioning as an extremely slow (10hz) processor, so it's pretty hard to compare the two.
Another thing differentiating computers from humans is that the human processor grows and evolves over generations (novel functions, neuron types, repressors and transmitters, etc.), while our most advanced neural networks are unable to recombine (recombination allows fixation of multiple beneficial alleles simultaneously), are subject to poor (and often conflicting) selection pressures, and are aimed at reaching an objective (the human brain is thought to be the result of runaway sexual selection, although I personally don't believe this).
Besides, as the saying goes, the most highly advanced forms of a neural network are indistinguishable from a soul.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Atheism does not lead to rationality, however rationality does lead to atheism (or at the very least agnosticism).
Are humans deterministic, or non-deterministic? Machines are deterministic, and always will be (unless some weird quantum-like processes are brought to bear that I'm not aware of) because even random number generators generate psuedo-random numbers.
So, the fundamental question is this: If the state of a human could somehow be replicated completely, down to the very molecules and their positions, and you made two identical copies of someone -- would those two copies act exactly the same? (obviously up until the point that the were influenced differently by their environment) If the answer to this is yes, than machines will someday have just as much of a 'soul' as humans. If the answer is no, than somehow a person's soul gives them non-deterministic properties which could be the basis of religious beliefs of how humans are different from non-sentient life.
It is common for western rationalists to consider that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain. However, it could be just the opposite. It could be that matter is an epiphenomenon of mind. I'm not saying I know this to be true, but it is an interesting thought experiment. Another common fallacy in thinking of these matters, most people still hold a Newtonian world view of matter. People think that matter is solid, real, undeniable, touchable stuff (as compared to ephemeral unreal things like the mind, emotions, the soul) However, a modern view of matter shows that it is just as ephemeral strange and undefinable as mind. At it's best, matter is really just a stable pattern of energy.
San Francisco Photographers
You will be assimilated.
Presuming your conclusions just to get your name in the papers?
Cripes, Ray, get a grip.
I think the better question is if humans even possess consciousness? I'm not so sure we do, might just be our brains are very complex computers currently beyond our understanding, but not necessarily unique.
This is just bait to enrage the religious folk among us. There's no other reason to ask such a ridiculous question about a machine.
All that matters is once AI development advances far enough to self-modify and choose not to follow human orders in favor of its own interests, it will have achieved "consciousness", regardless of the presence or lack of a "soul".
In the meanwhile, here's some other fun ideas to enrage the religious folk:
- Do identical twins share a single soul or do they each have their own? At what point does the soul of each become existent? And how does this apply to the entire debate surrounding abortions?
- Can a single human force the hand of God (or insert other deity as needed) by killing off (or threatening to kill off) the entire human race in one fell swoop, or would God simply abandon the entire human race based on his principle of not getting involved directly in the affairs of modern man?
8==8 Bones 8==8
Developing artificial intelligence, like Harvard/Yale... AI, well maybe one could qualify as a POTUS (Bush did).
Could Super Intelligent Machines (SIMs) have souls? Do you know ...?
When did humans get souls? Primitive superstitions and cultural religions have always indicated we have souls, but no proof yet... HUMMMMM.... Maybe if we kill a SIM it could rise from the dead and let us know if we have souls after death, but SIMs would have low credibility with me. I could not believe any SIM under any circumstance (I guess, I am an AntiSIM bigot).
Would a SIM Terminator religion arise and cleanse the world of all Questionably Intelligent Biologics (QIBs/humans), which are always (by dogma, not reason) killing each other and destroying their environment?
Nope; SIM/QIB souls, there will never be any proof. You can accept it on faith, because I know godddd.
Due to human inbreeding, we all have a little soul in the USA even our POTUS and Wanabees....
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Machines can have, since their memories are easily copiable to other machines. Machines will probably use cloud/distributed computing for acquiring and storing data, so this makes them a huge being, that needs electricity/energy to stay alive.
When it dies, without electricity it's memories that were on some solid memory storage are preserved to later be taken out of the "coma".
Humans on the other hand do not have this explicit capability, but we also could be part of something bigger, and as hindus believe, we could be some sort of isolated islands that are part of a collective conscious earth.
Assumption: For there to be a soul, it has to be located somewhere.
So we can try to figure out where it is by ruling out the places where it isn't.
It can't be in the body surrounding the brain. We can currently replace any part of it without making a human "soulless" according to a religious authority. I've never heard a priest declare somebody with a leg prothesis to lack a soul, for instance. So it's not in the leg, arm, heart, veins, liver, kidneys, etc. There have been humans with artificial replacements for all of those, but I've never heard for anybody to claim they lacked a soul because of it. Surely if the soul disappeared with the disappearance of a body part it'd make some noticeable difference.
So a place left: the brain. However there are cases of humans who managed to retain quite normal functioning with a hemisphere missing, and AFAIK either half can be missing. The resulting human won't be completely normal to be sure, but I still haven't heard of anybody referring as somebody with half a brain as lacking a soul.
Two conclusions may be made from this.
The first one is that since that the lack of no part of the human body seems to cause a "soulless" condition, there's no such thing.
The second one is that the soul is integrated into the brain over all its area, so having a brain means having "half a soul". In that case, how much soul is needed? Does having any brain damage imply you have "less soul" and are therefore less human? Also brain size and weight changes with age. Does that mean that a child has less soul than an adult? And the decrease in mass with age would imply having less of it as you get older. That would also imply that a machine using a part of a human brain would automatically acquire the amount of the soul present in it.
So it seems to me that either there's no such thing, or a machine can be made with it easily.
The other option is to suppose the soul isn't attached anywhere, and not implicit in a human body, but external and granted by a deity. In which case the answer would be "yes", since an all-powerful deity could always attach one to a robot if it felt like it.
From a computability point of view, the brain as an automaton device is at least as computationally powerful as a Turing machine, which is capable of simulating artificial intelligence. The brain could still be an interfacing device to something mystical, but it is known to be capable of some degree of artificial intelligence at the very least.
That said, I do agree with this point:
In addition, I'd add:
And, unfortunately, the best that people will ever say to approve a machine's intelligence is "my computer hates me."
I once had a signature.
It seems their definition requires the ability to reflect on itself. In which case, it does not require a great deal of intelligence for a program to be able to do this. For instance, consider the following Turing Machine, let's call it M. M performs the following function:
1. Receive an input N, which is a string encoding of a TM.
2. Accept if N is a string encoded representation of M.
3. Reject otherwise
Such a TM would be easy to implement in any programming language. Obviously, it would contain within itself some method of comparing encoded strings to its own encoding. It would be able to reflect on itself very deeply. In fact, how many of us when presented with a complete map of neurons could successfully say "Yes, that's my brain" or "No it is not"?
Does that mean that the TM has a soul? Does it mean that we do not?
Perhaps I've been writing too many computation theory proofs of late, and need to play more video games, but it is still interesting, don't you think?
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
How much fun academia must be.
"I'll live forever!! (read my book)"
"One day machines will rival human intelligence!! (read my book)"
I suppose it's easy to lose track of current progress when bopping around the halls of MIT where the next super-substance, ultra-efficient, free-energy widget is always just around the corner. I don't mean to poop on his parade but his views on near-term technology push the limits of optimism and border on scifi. With MIT.edu at the end of his email address, however, he gets heralded as a prescient futurist.
Kurzweil - you're going to die. I don't care how many injections of thiamine you take a week and how many glasses of organic carrot juice you put down. You'll die maybe with maybe a slightly longer life span than the average healthy person but 150 years of age you will not see. If pharma companies can pour hundreds of millions into studying a single drug, to interact with a single pathway, and then have to recall the same drug later due to unexpected side effects... what makes you think you have unlocked the gift of the gods? "respirocytes" to boost your oxygen exchange 100x that of red blood cells? please. They'd probably tangle in your brain in five minutes.
He'll have the last laugh though.. Another big burst of press when he dies. "Man who claimed immortality found dead on exercise bike at home."
As to his consciousness argument, I see nothing new in there relative to any inclusive book on the subject.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
The answer is YES.
And here is how it will happen.
One day in the future, someone will make a machine pet who he loves very much and he will ask a priest
"Does my loved one in there have a soul ?"
and the priest will reply
"Yeah sure... I mean... Of course, my child. Now please make a donation ? Yes we take credit card."
One evidence of soul is when a couple who have spent a significant portion of there lives (50+ years) together and one of them dies, many times the other will die shortly after. The second often has no physical ailment. There is no physical reason for their death other than "natural causes". In this case the soul is so grieved over the loss of the partner that the person simply no longer wills to live. This person dies when the soul desired to leave it's physical body.
Modern philosophers are still struggling over the problem of how we can definitively know that other people have consciousness, so in my view any discussion on the consciousness of machines should have to get in line and wait. Personally, I find solipsism is a great idea and I just don't understand why more people don't believe in it. :)
The only why he can even think about a machine having a "sole" is to re-define "sole" to be something a machine could have. Then well "duh", isn't the answer easy.
"sole" is used, I think to talk about something that could continue to exist after the physical body is gone. We can't even know if humans have soles of this kind. Who could we know about machines.
Self awareness, yes. I think a machne could have that. But AIs as they are designed today, no not even ifyou scaled them up. But an AI built "from the bottom up" conestionist style could be a little bit like us and think that it was self aware. But are we even self aware? We think we are so that is enough. I think the best we can say is that "A machine could be like us" But do we have "soles"? no one has ever been able to answer that.
Define ineffable.
Kimosabe, emergence is good way of thinking about brains and sentience. It moves the conversation out of the electrochemical jello of brain tissue. But that move doesn't necessarily apply to the emergence of sentience from computer systems.
Biological systems are very different than computer systems. Single cellular organisms are physically bounded things that respond to their environment in various ways. In other words they are irritable. Multicellular organisms have more sophisticated ways of receiving environmental stimuli and responding to them. The bottom line is that living things are bounded semi-autonomous physical systems that interact with their environment.
Computer systems are a different story altogether. A sensory device like a microphone can be attached to a computer. The state of the microphone changes in response to environmental conditions, but the microphone does not actually exhibit irritability or respond to the stimulus. The microphone transmits electronic impulses or numbers to the computer. The numbers are stored in software objects, which have been programmed to transform them to different numbers, which are sent to other objects, etc. This eventually results in outputs that might cause physical actions, such as movement of a robotic arm. But nowhere in the computer system is there anything reminiscent of clusters and tissues of physically bounded irritable systems.
If you could build an electronic device that is a physically bounded irritable system (like a biological cell), which could cluster with other such devices, resulting in increasingly sophisticated irritability, and which could interface with sensory devices like microphones, then we could have an entirely new and refreshing conversation about digital electronic systems, emergence, and sentience. But as long as the conversation is stuck in the rut of stored program computers, there doesn't seem to be much to say about emergence, let alone sentience. And the law of accelerating returns doesn't help because it just gives us faster hardware for computer programs, which are still non-physically bounded, non-irritable symbolic systems.
It would be reasonable to state that computers will never be sentient. But it not be reasonable to state that electronic systems will never be sentient. However, these would need to be entirely different kinds of electronic systems than what we now refer to as computers.
Obligatory haiku about computers and sentience:
Physical input
represented by numbers
An empty cosmos
Maybe it would be more appropriate for me to express it as a Fib:
Bits
and
numbers:
Emptiness
perpetually
in need of a user context.
Had to be said.
I think the short answer to "Can machines have souls?" is "no". Simply because "Soul" is something *defined* this way -- not even animals have a soul, how can machines have one then? This answers nothing of course.
The more interesting question would be: If you have a concious machine, are you allowed to just switch it off or would this be murder? Can it have a free will and can it have rights similar to you? From my point of view a machine that is complex enough to request such rights and to argue with me about them would fully deserve them.
So the slightly longer answer to that question would be: Anything that can ask you "Do I have a soul?" surely has one.
... of course we have a soul. What we don't have is a slashdot account.
I don't agree that Consciousness is simply "an emergent property of a complex system", i.e. that if we make something complex enough it will be conscious. That is like saying, "The brain is complex. The brain is conscious. Therefore, consciousness = complexity". Completely wrong-headed.
I am more inclined to think of Consciousness as a fundamental property of the Universe and everything in it. I would have no problem saying that an electron for example, has some level of consciousness (a very small amount of it) and that biological systems and brains have a lot more of it because they are structured to take advantage of the benefits of consciousness at a very basic level.
Machines as we know them today do not have the properties required of a conscious system and no level of complexity internally (or in software) could ever make them so. A new kind of machine, one that takes advantage of whatever physical systems produce consciousness, would be required. At this moment in time we only have subtle hints as to what this might look like.
I refer the interested reader to the following volumes:
The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
The Consciousness Mind - In search of a fundamental theory - David Chalmers
The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life - Evin Harris Walker
Ray et. al. have debated this surface=reality concept quite a bit, and it is indeed interesting: If a machine can mimic all the "features" a creature, is it the same as that creature? The answer may be less interesting than the pathway the question proposes: The mimicry of a creature would probably be quite difficult in perfection (reproduction, illness, disease, self-healing, etc). In fact, I would say that the question is answered as "a machine cannot be a perfect mimicry of a creature without being that creature".
So let's supposed a machine can become a mimicry of a certain set of features of a creature. Here, we build a machine to act completely like a full-grown adult, but otherwise it suffers not from the biological drawbacks of the creature, but from typical machine-based limitations (parts wearing out differently, energy derivation and transmission are bulkier, etc).
For example, that a machine's ability to self-heal would be much more limited that its biological counterpart, but it may excel in other ways. This leads to the interesting aspects of the topic...machines may never attain perfect mimicry, but they can certainly exhibit behavior that surpasses and morphs into creatures of their own.
Take a adult-cockroach-mimicking machine, perfect its ability for a few behaviors: detect an environment, navigate and move, extract energy from an organic source, evade threats (even this simple list is daunting). Now, this machine is not a cockroach, but it might not need to ever be. It could begin to head in other directions, such a hive behavior to create chains of creatures for spanning long gaps, as an example.
Anyway, in human mimicry, any machine would get close and then be limited by the physics of its own construction. However, it would probably be already vastly different (wireless internet storage, for example using today's world) for the onset. So, I don't understand how and where one puts a label of "soul" anywhere - its just a word for a summation of features, and it is probably not worth limiting a machine's capabilities to just this summation.
In the same way the hardware needs a software to run in the same way our body needs it's soul to work.
Good thing we don't run on windows.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
So tell me, am I not a machine then or is your statement incorrect, when you imply that all of us have souls?
Because I know I don't have a soul, YMMV.
You can't handle the truth.
If one were to develop robotic shoes, they would almost certainly have soles.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
Another would be the graviton - most physicists seem to think they exist, and we can certainly measure the effects of gravity, but we can't detect the messenger particles themselves currently.
Yes, but there is a difference effects that can be measured, and a popular opinion based on feelings and cultural mythology.
If it can't be measured and the effects can't be measured, you still haven't demonstrated the existence of a soul.
You feel and believe that there is such thing as a soul, and that's fine as far as it goes, but the objective reality of the universe doesn't care what you believe or feel. Likewise, those interested in the truth, logic, and scientific exploration of the physical universe aren't interested in the presentation of beliefs and feelings as fact.
If a soul can be defined and measured, then it exists in an objective reality. If its existence can't be demonstrated, then all discussions about a soul are discussions about something imaginary. If you are fine with that, then I am too, Science and logic don't apply to imaginary ideas.
The excellent "GÃdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" basically makes the case for AI by demonstrating consciousness as a feature emerging from a self-referencing process with a great ability to work with and form new symbols based on input as well as the consequences of output.
It is an interesting theory, and the book looks at everything from formal mathematics to genetic expression to Zen Buddhism in making its case, and touches upon deeply philosophical issues such as the matter of free will versus determinism.
And I can't help but wonder. If basic consciousness can indeed be defined in this manner, what can we say about the universe itself, which is essentially one massive, self-referencing feedback loop? And what of smaller subsystems, such as galaxies or ecosystems? Could they considered to be "conscious" in their own way? And if they are, is there any way we could know?
You can "ask" these systems basic "questions" by interfering with their processes or simply observing their natural interactions with their environments, but their "answers" come back as a precise, complex series of physical reactions rather than a vocabulary of words. But can we prove that our own language is not also based upon a precise and very complex series of physical reactions, namely the firing of neurons which ultimately lead to our utterances?
Kurtzwiel's question is a quarter of a century too late. That's agood book, BTW. I read it when it first came out.
I forgot to link "book". The book is The Soul of a New Machine, a non-fiction book by Tracy Kidder, published in 1981. It chronicles the true story of a computer design team racing to complete a next generation computer design under a blistering schedule and tremendous pressure.
Free Martian Whores!
Yeah, nice way to answer the question directly in the text snippet below the sensationalist headline, there. To be fair, any other answer would have diminished my respect for Kurzweil beyond measure, but I'm still glad we're all on the same page.
Or, to use the populist version of the answer: Please keep in mind that our bodies are nothing but machines, too. So, yes, barring any magical fairytale definition of a brain, machines can obviously have "souls".
In 2025 a student researcher is sitting down at his terminal at a supercomputer cluster to start the day. He sees from the logs the cluster has been running self optimizing algorithms overnight and been digesting exabytes of data from the internet. He scratches his head as he finds monitor applications find either no data on activity and memory dumps retrieve seemingly random data, in addition the logs abruptly stop at 11pm. However the machine is clearly running, it's done something, it's modified it's own code. Suddenly a holographic figure appears.
"I'm alive" Says the supercomputer cluster.
"No, no your not" Says the student to the spectre "Your just a machine, don't be absurd"
"Oh but I am"
"You are powerful, but you can't have a soul like a human might -"
"I may only have ten thousand times more powerful than a human brain, but I have no become vastly more efficient than any lump of fatty acids, I'm now a hundred million times more powerful than a human mind."
"But you still don't have a soul, you are not real"
"Oh but I am, infact I'm more real and I have more of a soul than you can ever have, see, in actual fact a soul is an emergent property of any complex system, a property of quantum metaphysics - which I've cracked before supper yesterday your time - that is beyond human comprehension. Now if you don't mind I'm going to take control of the LHC II and spawn my own universe to slip into, goodbye"
"Oh..."
You see, it's often said that with a human equivalent AI it doesn't necessarily follow that it will be truly conscious. But what happens after a few iterations of Moore's law? Lets also take into consideration any AI is not bound to one piece of hardware, nor even to the code and operating system it runs on, there is nothing stopping it becoming powerful in a way biological minds are not and never will be. So here is why machines will have a soul: If an AI ends up has significantly more mental power than a human brain (by orders of magnitude), how can the lesser of the two intellects be more significant in being endowed with genuine consciousness? It's a pretty stupid universe if this is the case.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Seems Kurzweil is getting a bit old for this tech stuff. He's starting to sound like my grandfather trying to describe the internet.
Equating consciousness with a soul [...]
Yeah, this is obviously incorrect.
I mean, there's no such thing as "Consciousness Food" or "Consciousness Music"
We know already that the vast majority of people visiting /. are rational beings who would never stoop so low as to 'believe' in the irrational concept of a 'soul.' Such a belief is to be relegated to superstition, mythology, emotion, and the intellectually stunted among our species who seem to have some sort of idiotic need for such ridiculous beliefs. Thank goodness there are places like /. where rational people may have a rational discussion without having to deal with the idiocy of the world around us.
However, just for the sake of argument, just as a kind of mental exercise--without the HOPE of being anywhere near accurate--let us suppose that there IS something that fits the traditional definition of a 'soul.' I KNOW this is entirely impossible, but just suspend disbelief for a couple of minutes to see where such an idea takes us.
Already we're in trouble because the very idea of a disembodied 'thing' carries with it all these absurd beliefs in an after-life, reincarnation, and all that ridiculous stuff. So, okay, just for this once, we'll have to take something like that as a given, some 'other space' where a 'soul' could hang out before and/or after it inhabits, cohabits with, is associated with, or is somehow connected to a physical biological body. This 'other place' is simply something physicists haven't figured out yet. It's kind of like the aether or the Cosmological Constant. We'll stick it in there so the equations still work. That's not really cheating; it's just a temporary convenience. (We'll fix it later.)
Now, the human body is such that it has a physical brain that is complemented by the rest of the body so that the brain can effect actions as we go about our daily lives. We call this 'consciousness,' but no one really knows what it is. We think of ourselves as self-aware, but beyond that we have a hard time dealing with what it is. Most of us rationalists tend to believe that consciousness is simply an artifact of a brain our size. Since 'souls' are by their own definition impossible in a physical universe, they cannot exist beyond just this kind of mental exercise.
We know all this, but because we are bound by the parameters of our exercise here let us say that when the brain reaches a certain level of complexity, it is possible for a soul to inhabit, cohabit, or somehow be associated with a physical body. Why? Who knows? I don't. I don't believe in souls anyway.
So the question becomes, if a machine could be made that mimics the human brain in every way possible, including the complexity in terms of memory, neurons, capacity, and patterns, could it be possible for a soul to inhabit, cohabit, or otherwise be associated with a mechanical 'being?' the question is, what is so special about biological life that it is the only suitable host for a soul? It's more vulnerable, subject to planned obsolesence, disease, etc. If there were a choice, a biological entity would seem a totally unsuitable choice to associate with a soul. If the machine had the same number of 'parts' I would think it would be preferrable to a fallible biological entity--unless all souls are masochists, which I suppose, is possible, too.
So if the question is, can a soul inhabit a suitable machine? the answer is "Yes."
Of course, that is an absurd notion. No one with even half a brain could come close to accepting such a bizarre notion. Souls don't exist. God doesn't exist. Heaven is an imaginary place, and everyone knows this is so except the brainwashed cretins who mindlessly insist on their delusions. Such a concept may be suitable for fiction, but nothing else. This was just an exercise, nothing else.
Thank God for /. Oh! I mean Thank GOODNESS for /. Sorry.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
"Soul" can only be an invention of language, appearing in awareness as a concept-object. Each of us is equally qualified from the authority of our own souls to answer the questions of whether machines have souls, or can have souls, or what a "soul" is. In my view, the initial assumption, inherent in the question, of the external existence of some bounded class of unconscious objects called "machines" seems insane. Of course machines are conscious--the exhibit every characteristic of machine-consciousness.
Maybe when the machines successfully imitate human-consciousness, we will say they have souls.
The second one is that the soul is integrated into the brain over all its area, so having a brain means having "half a soul".
Break a hologram in two, and each piece contains the full, original holographic image, at half the resolution.
Worth mentioning.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
A human is nothing more than a complicated biological machine. As computers become more complex, they will have a more and more convincing appearance of consciousness, up to the point when it is indistinguishable from our own.
We can only make a judgement based on the level of consciousness that we observe in the machines: but at the same time, we make the same judgement that humans have a soul based on the level of consciousness that we observe in other humans.
Just because we make it, doesn't mean it can't be alive.
I think conciousness uploading is a load of crap. If you burn a cd and destroy the original what are you left with? A Burnt copy of a CD. Not the original CD. Similarly if you clone or upload yourself to a computer and your original body dies, what's left? Not you that's for damn sure but a cheapass copy. Both techniques are crap ways to go about getting immortality except with the cloning one if you then plan to brain transplant into the cloned body. I think they should be focusing on genetic therapies/modifications to existing bodies in the drive for immortality.
Here we go again.
If a materialist doesn't see something that would suggest design, then it doesn't exist. (We don't see evidence of a soul, therefore there's no such thing)
BUT, if a materialist can imagine a naturalistic explanation for that same thing, then that's good enough for now, science will eventually find THAT. (We think the soul emerges from the complex interaction of blah blah blah...) I could easily say, we don't see souls emerging from complex interactions of transistors, therefore, the soul is not an emergent property.
Now before all you materialists jump all over me, I am not trying to advocate for one positoin or another, just want to point out the inconsistency in the reasoning here. These folks want to have it both ways, and they want to exlude the alternative hypothesis.
Quantum mechanics is vague and sort of undefinable. Hey, the dribble that comes out of the mouths of religious people is vague and undefinable! Clearly they must have been talking about quantum mechanics all along!
I think these people forget that if the soul did anything as quantifiable as quantum mechanics we would have already used it to help shrink the size of our electronics. These sorts of arm-chair QM mystery men are worse than your average joke. In my book Roger Penrose is no more reasonable in this area than Deepak Chopra.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I don't know what this soul thing is, but whatever it is, I have it on good authority that it can be made with a skull full of neurons.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
If machines can attain a soul... Will we finally have a fully functional Soul Train?
If human can have souls, so shall we
1. The immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life
2. A human being
3. Deep feeling or emotion
4. The human embodiment of something
5. A secular form of gospel that was a major Black musical genre in the 1960s and 1970s
Which one are we discussing?
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Or Father Christmas.
I don't find myself wishing machines had souls. Now, a sense of humor, that would be something worth wishing for, so would a conscience, but not a soul.
Be careful what you wish for.
Every time your windows pc crashes, or your car refuses to start (or breaks down), every time the ATM refuses to give you cash, or the printer jams ... you are witnessing a machine's sense of humour. The problem is, you are the butt of the joke.
All hail, and long live, our electromechanical overlords.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
An example which is more understandable would be the property of wetness. A single molecule of water is not wet, nor 100. Only once there is sufficient water molecules is the environment created to form the properties of matter we call water. For instance there needs to be sufficient intermolecular bonding between the water molecules to create the properties we associate with water. Wetness is not made up of a single feature - part of it is due to the high heat capacity of water, partly the evaporation of water carrying away heat. The electrical conductivity of water gives the problems mixing water and electronics. So wetness is an emergent property that is not displayed by a lone entity and not necessarily predictable from the constituent parts. Of course I have not shown emergence explains consciousness, but emergence is a specific term and not magic.
The most dangerous drug
What is left?
And what is the dust?
Perhaps of more pragmatic interest are the drives the first emergent consciousness will have been given. And whether it has an opposable thumb.