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.'"

Comments

Computers: danger to America or threat to America?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Awareness/consciousness..

[new_breed]

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..

Thoroughly agree..

[tobe]

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.

Re:Define soul.

[bigstrat2003]

Feel threatened in your religious beliefs much? Don't worry, that phenomenon you see around you whereby people abandon irrational creeds is called progress. It's slow coming, but it's coming.

Holy fuck! Speaking of trolling (flamebaiting, more appropriately, I guess, but I generally feel flamebait is just a specific form of troll)...

Anyway, the GP is exactly right. The knee-jerk atheists need to calm down and STFU for a while. The word "soul" does not necessarily have religious overtones. It can refer to many things, the religious concept of an immortal soul being only one. The meaning relevant here is the usage of "soul" as a synonym for consciousness equivalent to what humans possess. There is no damn reason to get all worked up about this word.

On a side note, it's hilarious how the loud, knee-jerk atheists trumpet the irrationality of people who are religious... yet they themselves are completely irrational about the subject of religion, as demonstrated in this discussion, where many have jumped all over a word merely for having another meaning which is associated with religion.