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.'"
Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's a soul? (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, anything else can.
Unless someone has a proof otherwise.
Pointless... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't even know if humans have souls so what's the point of speculating over machines?
Do humans have souls? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [stanford.edu] is and calling it an emerging property is not really much of a progress.
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Insightful)
And here come the knee-jerk atheists!
This is not a religious exercise. If anything, the article seems to be approaching this from the standpoint of secular humanism (which, despite popular belief, is not a euphemism for 'atheist').
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.
looks like a three step process? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's a soul? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if humans have one as believed by fundamentalist christians it's a basic property of the soul that it's exclusive to humans.
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cop out (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, of course machines can have souls! (Score:5, Insightful)
We're machines, and *we have souls...
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It doesn't matter for Kurzweil... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Define soul. (Score:1, Insightful)
A soul is the behavioral pattern that you would describe as "conscience". There's nothing magical about it and machines have it as well - if they use a certain learning strategy.
There are many ways to produce behavior if you're programming an AI. There is much ado about problem solving, but does every last human really try to genuinly solve problems ? We all know the answer to that one is simply no. Most visibly muslims weren't trying to solve any problem on 9/11. Not the ones actually killing Americans, not the ones celebrating that act. Instead humans learn through imitation mainly.
Think about this : imitation provides MUCH more information that positive-negative feedback.
A conscience is what Christians, and more general all what you might call "humanitarian" relgions teach their children. Once this must have been explicit, in at least one generation, but it spread and is now close to implicit, noone really notices it anymore. But any examination of a kindergarten will provide almost uncontestable proof that it is indeed taught. It is a rare child that has anywhere near a complete conscience before the age of 8 (or it is where I live). It is a rare 8-year-old that really grasps that killing is not okay.
So what is a soul ? It's an idea. An idea that can be taught to machines and humans alike. To be more exact, it's the idea that "built" the world we live in. It's immortal only in the sense that the result of the work these people put in lasts, as does their memory, and the ideas of souls and consciences itself.
It has conquered most of the planet, and is conquering any land it comes in contact with, even islamic lands, and it seems to everyone a ridiculous notion that it will ever leave again, even though for example in those islamic lands there are huge masses of soulless people (even if by now the majority can no longer be counted as such).
Even though that is not outside of the realm of possibility. We mostly say of people like child soldiers that they've been indoctrinated. In reality we've been indoctrinated too, only we've been indoctrinated with an idea that slowly developed, as described by the bible. An idea that manifests itself in that book in the person of Jesus Christ.
Every story before him (and many stories after him) describe genocide, killing your own family, eradicating entire peoples as an economic proposition. That the enemy is human is acknowledged, but judged inconsequential. When the order was given to try to kill Jesus as a baby, and many such orders, and worse have been given in the Roman empire, it was carried out without hesitation.
So here's a better question. The Roman republic, an institution filled with people we admire perhaps too much, once killed over a million people, people whom they had captured and abducted, separated from their families, half killed and sold off, some as meat.
They did not kill them quickly. They nailed them to the cross, in a technique that, while hurting like hell, avoids piercing any major blood vessels but breaking many bones. Even if anybody succeeded in securing them and removing them from said cross, they were unlikely in the extreme to survive in those days without disinfectant. But when nailed to the cross they were not dead. The Romans describe, matter-of-factly, that it took most of them over 2 days to die. Some were reported to still be twitching after 5 days. Soldiers, hordes of soldiers took daily inspections to capture and nail to another cross anyone who tried to help any of these slaves.
None of these people had received trial, and more than a few are bound to have been mere passers-by.
Tell me, the soldiers, and their commanders, did they have souls ?
The Christian doctrine that everybody has a soul, which can be destroyed without damage to the body it resides in, after which said body will become a genocidal bastard rivaling the islamic "prophet" simply means that everybody can be taught to behave in this pattern. Obviously this means, to the pope for example, that eve
Re:Pointless... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's ignorant to lack belief if for no other reason than you're own personal biases. Adhering to atheism simply because one dislikes religion is no more rational or enlightened than adhering to any one religion. There are rational cases for atheism to be made, but a great many atheists have no knowledge or interest in these cases.
Simply because atheism may be rational does not make all atheists rational. Just like simply because certain religions teach values like peace and morals does not mean that all members of those religions are peaceful or moral.
Lumping these people together under one banner is the "simple" approach the GP spoke of that breeds prejudice and bias.
Re:Define soul. (Score:2, Insightful)
I know what two objects that are dissimilar look like.
I know what two objects that are similar look like.
By induction I can imagine two objects that are so similar they are identical.
This is how I view our understanding of equality, taking the difference between dissimilar objects and similar ones and applying that difference once again to similar objets to get identical objects.
Or, along a completely different line of thought, since no one has truly experienced two objects that are identical do we truly comprehend the idea of equality, or do we simply comprehend the idea of extremely similar. Likewise, the notion that humans understand the infinite is suspicious, does anyone truly understand the infinite, because I usually hear it described as really really really really large, which doesn't seem to adequately describe the notion of infinite.
Re:What's a soul? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not a well thought-trough argument. I guess you were trying to say that there is no reason, (except if by definition) that a soul would be exclusive to humans - which is of course valid.
Re:Thoroughly agree.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Soul (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Animals? (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
"We don't even know exactly what part of the brain is responsible for what"
Yes, we do. I suggest you read some literature that has been written in the last 20 years.
We even know which part of the brain makes you feel unique from your surroundings.
Maybe is a cowardly cop out.
Re:Pointless... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pointless... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting analogy, but I don't think you take it far enough. Of course images on a screen won't ever actually become an apple, because images aren't trying to actually be the object, just a picture of an object.
Let's take it further. What if I hook that computer up to a 3d printer that can model an Apple? What if somewhere down the line the technology advances to the point where that 3D printer can assemble the appropriate organic molecules and shape them into an apple? What if it gets to the point where it can do so with such accuracy that you could eat that assembled apple and not be able to discern at all whether it was grown in a machine or grown on a tree? Is it an apple then?
I would agree that an AI that's functionally just a bunch of pre-programmed responses to various inputs is unlikely to be self-aware, no matter how many responses it's capable of and who it might fool. But to argue that that is the only direction in which AI can go seems to be short-sighted.
Consciousness is a brain function. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Insightful)
If something exists, it can be measured.
Quantum physics tells us that in some situations, it's not possible to measure all aspects of a particle at once.
Even setting that aside, just because it's possible within the constraints of the physical universe to measure something doesn't mean that we as humans have the technology to measure it.
Even setting that aside, most people who believe in souls attribute some sort of metaphysical and/or supernatural aspect to them - that is, it has aspects that extend beyond the purely physical universe. To use a potentially strained metaphor, the code for Tempest running in MAME can't tell that it isn't running on the real hardware (assuming the emulator is fully accurate), but that doesn't mean nothing outside of its emulated environment exists. 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.
It's one thing to say there's no physical evidence of a soul, but it's pretty arrogant to use that as the basis for claiming that it doesn't exist at all. Until we've fully reverse-engineered the universe (including how self-awareness works), I'm staying neutral on the topic.
Can Machines Ever Have Souls? (Score:1, Insightful)
Anybody who has ever owned a classic, air-cooled VW knows the answer to this question is an unqualified yes.
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to measure (Score:3, Insightful)
So if there's no way to measure "spiritual" properties, is there any particular reason to even assume they do exist?
Re:Similar complxity != similar properties (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pointless... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I could substitute "functions" for "cells", and claim the same thing about you. How can a machine built out of hydrocarbons and water ever be conscious?
Re:Define soul. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, Quantum Physics does indeed tell us that one cannot concurrently know certain things about certain systems. There are two ways of looking at this. Either there are hidden variables (or something similar) which if we only knew we would know these quantities (these would as it turns out have to be awful odd things but it is a worthy field of inquiry none the less). The second is that these quantities do not exist.
If you are into Occam's razor then since the first idea postulates a whole bunch of stuff you simply don't need one concludes that the second is the more likely proposition.
You appear to reject Occam's razor as a philosophical concept. That is perfectly justifiable. I would be interested to know however, what criterion would you use to differentiate between Maxwell's equations, and the theory that light behaves exactly the way Maxwell's equations describe due to invincible super unicorns forcing it to?
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apologists have tried to argue that their "soul" has flown the coop or is halfway-out of them or simply some "connections" to the body are broken or something, but that seems a much more convoluted argument and fails to explain much of the observed phenomena.
Certainly memory is often impaired, which if it were a function of the "soul" would presumably exist somewhere, yet access to it is clearly limited in many individuals. So go ahead, make up a lot of voodoo to explain it so that it includes a "soul," but don't expect the convoluted rain-dance around the evidence to be very convincing.
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree as long as we accept the opposite corollary: the lack of evidence doesn't point towards its existence either.
Generally I don't believe in things without evidence, there is no evidence of a soul, so I don't believe in it. This isn't saying it doesn't exist, but just the expedient course of action would to be not to believe, for the sake of epistemological simplicity. If I believe in things without empirical evidence, I must then believe in infinite things (invisible dragons, angels, ESP, UFOs, and all of the god's who ever existed), unless there is a finite criteria (currently measurable) to proving falsehood attached to the concept.
The soul lacks this criteria, obviously.
I'm sick of people, as an aside, equating the term "soul" to consciousness, it only serves to muddy the waters with religious connotations. Consciousness can exist without a soul (by definition), thus the two cannot be equated.
As for the topic at hand, I doubt computers can have a soul (by the popular religious definition), since they lack the whole God thing. They may, perhaps, someday have consciousness, though. As for emotions, they might, but probably not that we could understand. I'm not banking on any of this happening in my life time though, if ever.
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Insightful)