Ray Kurzweil Wonders, Can Machines Ever Have Souls? 630
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.'"
Re:Define soul. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Do humans have souls? (Score:3, Informative)
Every human has one soul, for a given value of "soul".
Of course, there's lots of other concepts we have that we treat as important but defy quantification: justice, love, duty, fairness. What social scientists do when dealing with these unavoidable concepts is adopt an "operational definition". An "operational definition" doesn't claim to capture every nuance of a concept's essence, instead it is a measurable or observable thing which stands in for the other concept within the context of an experiment. Within that context, it should fulfill all the functions we attribute to that thing.
In this situation, Kurzweil is defining "soul" to be "consciousness". This is an operational definition, because consciousness can be tested for, at least in a crude way. This definition can "operate", if you will, within the context of any theory of ethics in which human rights arise from self-awareness. In those theories, "person" is in effect defined as a self-conscious entity. Self consciousness plays precisely the same role in those theories as "soul" in theories where personhood arises from the soul.
A self-conscious machine would have the functional equivalent of a "soul" for purposes of any discussion of ethics where we accept that any self-conscious entity has a right to determine its own destiny. However, I suspect other things might well qualify as possessing "souls" under this definition, such as communities and nations. Perhaps the definition of "soul" must stipulate that a soul is irreducible; it is not a "soul" by virtue of any component of it possesses "soul-ness". I don't know, I never considered that before. This would disbar communities from technical "personhood", although not necessarily from rights which arise from self-awareness per se.
Re:Define soul. (Score:2, Informative)
There is no such thing as a 'separate soul'. If people keep multiplicate but otherwise provided favourable conditions, each individual will develop a 'refined soul'. If people suddenly die, these 'souls' won't add up, simply go down with the body.
How would you explain 'soulless' animals which somehow display self awareness, and various degree of awareness?
It is simply brain size and complexity and experience that defines their 'soul'.
Remember Terry Schiavo? Her brain slowly evaporated due to lack of oxigen, her ego and self-awareness diminished with her brain.
Here, you got your anwers. If you want to live in blissful ignorance, don't ask questions.
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's a soul? (Score:3, Informative)
No, he's saying that if humans possess a given property, than an arbitrary other thing *could* possess that property as well -- not that they necessarily do.
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Informative)
"Religious", without modifiers, would be fine. "Metaphysical" might be slightly more precise.
Its certainly of religious origin, though its had some development outside of what might be considered religious thoughts by the narrowest possible definition.
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
Ah, Kurzweil (Score:3, Informative)
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.