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

Please help me think of the right tag

[frenchgates]

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.

Re:Please help me think of the right tag

[Thanshin]

"flyingcars"

Re:Do humans have souls?

[4D6963]

You don't the *whole* answer?

He accidently the whole answer.

Re:Define soul.

[Colonel Korn]

Soul: Immortal spiritual being

Like the highlander?

Hope not.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.