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

Re:Define soul.

[morgan_greywolf]

Buddhists don't believe in 'reincarnation' in the sense that you are thinking.

In Buddhism, all things are said to be ephemeral -- which is just a fancy word meaning temporary. Even the soul is ephemeral. The concept of 'ephemeralness' (is that a word?) is central to Buddhism because Buddhism teaches that one should not become attached to things because all things are ephemeral. That's why life is so much suffering in the world -- suffering stems from attachment.

Anyway, to simplify the soul concept greatly: if you think of the ocean and you pull out a glass of water from the ocean, the water in the glass is what Buddhists call 'the soul'. When the glass breaks (death), then the water merges back to the ocean. That specific volume of water is no longer identifiable again -- if you were to dip another (or even the same) glass into the ocean, you'd get a different soul, because you'd have a separate distinct volume of water.

Re:Define soul.

[DragonWriter]

Surely you mean 'quasi-religious', not 'pseudo-religious'.

"Religious", without modifiers, would be fine. "Metaphysical" might be slightly more precise.

Further, the idea of soul is not religious in origin, but philosophical.

Its certainly of religious origin, though its had some development outside of what might be considered religious thoughts by the narrowest possible definition.

It comes to us from Socrates, via Plato.

Certainly, many particular ideas about the soul that have been influential through Christianity are a result of Plato's speculations about the soul being part of the Hellenistic influence on Jewish thought of the period immediately before the Christian era and Christian thought subsequently, but, no, the idea of the soul doesn't originate with Plato. The earliest references to a soul separate from the body are much earlier, and there are also views of the soul which do not necessarily view it as distinct from the body (which certainly is the sense in which Kurzweil interpreted the question, whether it is how the questioner intended it or not) which also predate Plato, and there are many ideas of souls in religion that, whether or not they predate Plato's discussion, are clearly independent of it.