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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.
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]
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
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.
Care to back that up? Seriously, while I do understand and appreciate the atheistic outlook on life it's far from "proven". And that's not even to give any credence to the theists either. I just find it a far notion that you use the term "proving" (as in science, I take it) in this case. I think we would do well to remember the fundamentals of science before making such proclamations. Proof is a tricky matter. When it comes down to it we have precious little understanding of such matters and to just go off and claim that consciousness is nothing more than a few neurons firing as a fact is fairly assuming.
Simply put, I think what appears "incredibly obvious" is that we're very early on in our understanding of the nature of things and consciousness may be more than what we think of it today. We're all too fast to assume that we're at the apex of human understanding. If nothing else it's best to shrug of the question with a simple "maybe".
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.
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.
I suspect the reason it's obvious to him is that there's a grand total of zero evidence showing otherwise. Just like there's a grand total of zero evidence showing that The Flying Spaghetti Monster is real. The Invisible Pink Unicorn on the other hand is the one and true queen, may her hooves never be shod. I know because I've felt her in my life.
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..
Are centuries-old texts really "new-age?"
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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!
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.
Computers already have souls - its their BIOS!
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
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.
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? ]=-
. . . and it's a black one: They do *exactly* what we tell them to do.
Regards;
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
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.
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?
"Any system that's sufficiently complex will display behavior similar to our own"
Only if it's enviroment it evolved in has been similar to are own. Otherwise it would show a different type of cognition.
I think the answer will come when we can define self awareness. assuming self awareness isn't just hubris.
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.
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.
"The right to marry other machines?"
Not if they have the same OS.
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.
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"
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.