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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.
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]
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
We're machines, and *we have souls...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
To believe in something that can't be tested and has no evidence is crazy.
Of course we aren't at the Apex of knowledge, irrelevant to the point. To say something that isn't testable and doesn't explain any oberservable natural event as "maybe" is foolish.
The answer is "No" until otherwise tested.
Considering all tests of religion/soul have proven negative there is a very strong reason to stop believing in that foolishness and get on with life.
We have started seeing indicators in models of the human brain; based on that I current hypothesis that an accurate built model of the brain will have what we would consider consciousness.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
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.
Anybody who has ever owned a classic, air-cooled VW knows the answer to this question is an unqualified yes.
So if there's no way to measure "spiritual" properties, is there any particular reason to even assume they do exist?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If the consciousness is not in the brain, but instead somewhere else, how is it that consciousness is affected by drugs? Drugs can alter the subjective experience of consciousness quite dramatically. Yet they're nothing but mundane organic chemicals which fuck with brain chemistry. That, to me, is extremely strong evidence that consciousness is resident in the brain.
If 'I' were a supernatural entity resident elsewhere - a 'soul' using the brain as an interface to the physical world - then I might expect drugs to slow down transmissions from the brain, or even scramble them to some extent. So reflex delays, loss of coordination, even hallucination, that's possible. But the core 'I', the consciousness, should be serenely unaffected by this.
Anybody who has done something bloody stupid while drunk knows that this is not what brain-affecting drugs are like. The consciousness itself as a subjective experience is strongly affected by chemicals which affect the brain.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.