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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.'"
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.
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.
Yeah, but why does he use this unscientific and highly religiously charged word? As if consciousness wouldn't be enough of a problematic notion.
We don't know what consciousness is and calling it an emerging property is not really much of a progress.
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He didn't choose to use this "unscientific and highly religiously charged word" - he was asked a specific question in an interview - Will super intelligent machines ever have souls? and he responded by saying that the soul was a synonym for consciousness and continued from that point.
Don't blame Kurzweil for an interviewer who uses fuzzy pseudo-religious language.
"flyingcars"
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.
Soul: Immortal spiritual being
Like the highlander?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.)
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We're machines, and *we have souls...
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You're a very clever troll, but I'll bite...
here come the knee-jerk atheists
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.
What is your consciousness? What makes you sentient? They've poked and prodded every orifice of your body and they have still not been able to determine where your consciousness
Have you considered that consciousness is an illusion of a human brain that has become powerful enough to reflect on its own existence? That's why you won't find it in the body or the brain, anymore that you'll find a tummy ache if you look inside your stomach.
this 'thing' in quantum physics called 'the observer'
Nice confusion here. The "observer" in quantum physics doesn't have to be sentient or conscious. A simple camera is enough to skew a quantum physic's experiment.
Yet, most people seem to acknowledge its existence. Even many scientists, atheist or not.
Wrong logic here. It's not because scientists and "most people" acknowledge the existence of consciousness that they all agree it's a metaphysical being. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd say most scientists believe consciousness is a physical brain process that has nothing to do with metaphysics or religion.
Basically -- what is the ghost in the machine? Your body is a machine. Increasingly, your brain is seen as a neurological computer with neurons firing and whatnot. What is your consciousness? What makes you sentient? They've poked and prodded every orifice of your body and they have still not been able to determine where your consciousness -- this 'thing' in quantum physics called 'the observer' -- is. It's not in the brain, it's not the organs, it's not anywhere. Yet, most people seem to acknowledge its existence. Even many scientists, atheist or not.
You've tossed the baby out with the bathwater in your list of where consciousness is not. It's clear from observation that consciousness exists in interaction between the nervous system and the world around it (and also the nervous system and the rest of the material of the body). It is an emergent property. Subjectively consciousness is unitary although this may not in fact be the case- there are multiple systems of consciousness (vision, hearing, haptic, cognition, etc). The works of James J. Gibson and Edward Reed- among others- are worth checking out in this regard.
The conceptual difficulty comes from the popular notions of "soul" present in various mythologies, especially the notion of an immortal soul that is somehow placed into the body at some point and which leaves the body at some point. The existence of this soul is non-demonstrable and its existence is an article of faith not observation; it becomes problematic when faith attempts to trump observable reality.
Interestingly the Buddhist conception of human functioning avoids these difficulties. It denies the existence of an immortal individual soul and identifies all aspects of existence as mutually emergent properties which are conditional, constantly changing and ultimately temporary. Over-simplistically, Buddhism proposes six types of consciousness: sight, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and mental formations. Each arises as an interaction between the properties of the organism and the properties of its environment. No permanent, immortal and highly problematic soul (which violates the laws of physics) is needed.
But they believe in reincarnation/rebirth. If anything is persisting after death to be reintegrated back into a new body or really anything else, then I'd argue that's just a soul under a different name. Same concept.
For what it's worth, discussions of "soul" aside, I personally don't believe that machines (at least as we build them) will ever truly be self aware. I look at it almost as I do images: images on a screen are made up of little dots (pixels). Look at an old Atari game system and if they draw an Apple on screen, it's quite recognizable, but obviously a pretty poor representation.
In the same manner, if you take very simple AI's of today, you can have them recognize "How are you today?" and respond accordingly, but their limited responses will also make a pretty poor representation.
Increase the pixel count or the complexity of the AI though, and it starts to become a better *representation*. The apple looks more realistic. Eventually photo realistic. The AI becomes smarter. Eventually it can pass a Turing test. HOWEVER, in both cases, they are simply high refined representations/emulations of an object. No matter how detailed the picture of the apple becomes, it never becomes a real apple. No matter how fine the granularity of the responses of the AI becomes, it's still just a collection of little functions that passed the point of "photorealism" from a conversational perspective. That doesn't mean it's self aware.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'm all for science, cause I believe that if our understanding of science was ever to become good enough that we actually could prove/disprove Gods existance, all you atheists would be in for a surprise.
The fact that you have a thought process that says, "Here's a completely unsupported idea - disprove it people! If you can't my unsupported idea is true," shows that you are, in fact, not supportive of science at all. Do you believe in people being abducted by little green men? No? If your logical reason is lack of proof (and personal opinions are not logical reasons), then you are a hypocrite. Please understand what kind of joke makes you, along with anyone else who thinks like this, look like. A hypocrite.
Also, the last time I checked, your god is losing ground on "supposedly" his own words, especially within the last 100 years. Religion dissolving and people losing parts of their core belief system and religious cherry-picking is proof of that. Science is replacing god's place more and more, year after year. If your god really "loves" you then he will wake the fuck up and replace some science with himself. The atheists are waiting.
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.
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No matter how fine the granularity of the responses of the AI becomes, it's still just a collection of little functions that passed the point of "photorealism" from a conversational perspective. That doesn't mean it's self aware.
So, does that means that YOU are not self-aware? All you are is a collection of complex cellular interactions. You have a finite number of neurons, make a huge but finite number of connections. Those connections behave in subtle ways that are influenced by a finite number of conditions. So, you can't imagine a combination of hardware and sortware that can emulate a neuron? Or a thousand neurons and their interactions?
There's a big difference between the number of neurons you have and an infinite number of them. You want to be careful using the word "never" when all of the pieces of the puzzle are finite, and increasingly well understood. Massively interconnected neural pathways - whether hardware, software, or some future bio-engineered replacement - are no more inconceivable than are tiny microprocessors containing millions of transistors, operating miniscule radios with keyboards that let you read this sentence on a photorealistic display. Those technologies were previously considered outlandish or prohibitively, incomprehensively complex. And that was just earlier in the lives of millions of people who today use such technology before breakfast every morning.
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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
Which has nothing to do with the soul. Why do people trying to support unevidenced ideas always jump immediately to quantum mechanics? It isn't what you think it is, it's not some sort of universal "get my shitty idea instant credibility" card, not even if your Roger Penrose.
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