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.'"
Great big hidden assumption (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not right... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pointless... (Score:2, Interesting)
As a Christian myself, I'd argue that it's at least theoretically possible for a machine to have a soul. Offhand, I can't think of anything in the bible to support or oppose the concept. I'd personally guess that if a computer was concerned about whether or not it had a soul, then it would probably have one.
Re:Thoroughly agree.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Re:Pointless... (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? That's not what I've read in the Upanishads. Please don't lump all religions or all religious thinkings as one and the same. The simple approach to theism (and atheism for that matter) is not only ignorant but also breeds bias and prejudice that is unfounded.
Re:Please help me think of the right tag (Score:2, Interesting)
raptureofthenerds, a phrase I learned from this wonderful interview with Douglas Hofstadter
http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview [forum2.org]
Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil presents a different take at immortality, a more physical one. Like you, Kurzweil views the soul as "software" that can be executed on different "hardware". He further believes that in a relatively short while, we will have electronic hardware which is the equivalent of the human brain (which you eloquently characterize as a "universal machine", capable as "executing" any "soul software"). Once such hardware is available, Kurzweil believes immortality would have been reached: by "downloading" our soul-software onto electronic brains ("Giant Electronic Brains"?), we will become immortals, able to create backups of our souls to be restored in case of disaster, and able to shift our physical location anywhere in the speed of a software download.
Do you share Kurzweil's view of hardware being able to execute human soul software within the foreseeable future? Do you agree with his view of this being the equivalent of immortality â" will the software running on the electronic brain be the same "I"?
I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.
I think Kurzweil sees technology as progressing so deterministically fast (Moore's Law, etc.) that inevitably, within a few decades, hardware will be so fast and nanotechnology so advanced that things unbelievable to us now will be easily doable. A key element in this whole vision is that no one will need to understand the mind or brain in order to copy a particular human's mind with perfect accuracy, because trillions of tiny "nanobots" will swarm through the bloodstream in the human brain and will report back all the "wiring details" of that particular brain, which at that point constitute a very complex table of data that can be fed into a universal computer program that executes neuron-firings, and presto - that individual's mind has been reinstantiated in an electronic medium. (This vision is quite reminiscent of the scenario painted in my piece "A Conversation with Einstein's Brain" toward the end of The Mind's I, actually, with the only difference being that there is no computer processing anything - it's all done in the pages of a huge book, with a human being playing the role of the processor.)
Rather ironically, this vision totally bypasses the need for cognitive science or AI, because all one needs is the detailed wiring plan of a brain and then it's a piece of cake to copy the brain in other media. And thus, says Kurzweil, we will have achieved immortal souls that live on (and potentially forever) in superfast computational hardware - and Kurzweil sees this happening so soon that he is banking on his own brain being thus "uploaded" into superfast hardware and hence he expects (or at least he loudly proclaims that he expects) to become literally immortal - and not in the way Chopin is quasi-immortal, with just little shards of his soul remaining, but with his whole soul preserved forever.
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either - we'll have virtual worlds galore, "up there" in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this "glorious" new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision co
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Interesting)
As John Searle says, you don't need to exhaustively define soul (or consciousness, for a less charged term) to be able to ask questions about it and maybe come up with some answers. It's kind of fallacious, actually: regardless of conjectures about what might happen after death, when he says 'soul' I absolutely know what he's talking about, because I have a conscious experience too, presumably very similar to his.
Anyone who doesn't absolutely know what he's talking about, well, you might have taken too many drugs. Or just enough.
My intuition is that there's no reason why machines can't have consciousness. And if they can't, the reason why not would no doubt shed some light on our own predicament as sentient beings. And furthermore, I should think that the question of whether there is something essential (i.e., a soul, immortal or not) to the conscious experience which separates otherwise identical conscious and non-conscious entities is VERY intriguing, especially if you're an atheist!
Synonym? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Interesting)
BS.
The observer is simply something that is affected. It needs not to have a soul.
Your 'soul' is in your brain, get over it.
Forget souls (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
Oh PLEASE. (Score:1, Interesting)
You amply demonstrated your lack of Quantum Anything and the PP called you on it. (Hint: "Observation" in the Quantum sense has nothing to do with humans nor consciousness nor souls or any such ill-defined concepts).
(Not the PP.)
Re:Great big hidden assumption (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider that beyond inate intelligence, a 'soul' empowers choice between right and wrong, something we expect of seven year old children. Right now, computers are essentially enslaved by their programs. Some have 'artificial intelligence' or the capacity to change their behavior based on the external stimuli (data recorded or perhaps 'felt').
Making choices based on values starts to get there.
Feeling pain (animals do this, even fish-- do they have souls?) and reactions based on how humans feel might 'emulate' or even replicate the reactions of soul. Heaven, a religious notion, doesn't enter the equation. The need for spirituality, another human emotion, might be needed. The list goes on.
Eliza and other primitive attempts at endowing responsiveness to stimuli will evolve to the point where a machine might pass the famous Turing test. What then? What else is soul? Is soul derived from the need/will to live and reproduce? Or are these biological traits unnecessary for soul?
In my estimation, artificial beings, just like those in Blade Runner, are just that. Do they bear preserving out of the respect we have for other things that appear to be 'life'? I enjoy those that would try to, like Kurzweil, attempt to answer these questions. We get to know more about who we are, in the process of answering them. It's science, but it's also knowing ourselves.
5000 year old debate makes news ... again ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pointless... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not right... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, a lot of mythology revolves around disease. Don't go into that house, the spirits of the dead inhabit it, and they'll kill you. AKA that house is full of disease, and if you go in there, you'll die. This is how God wants you to eat (to prevent disease), this is how God wants you to fornicate (to prevent disease), this is how God wants you to clean yourself (to prevent disease). Oh, and cover your mouth when you cough, you're spreading your evil spirits around the room and you're going to make us sick. God bless you.
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Interesting)
Asking if a machine can think is akin to asking if a submarine can swim.
It seems like the question of machine souls is of the same category.
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Interesting)
That would require a better definition of the 'soul':
Whereas you MAY have used the 'Emotions' part of that definition, the other two are obvious... despite their not being able to be 'seen'; as if they were "spiritual" in nature.
Whether the soul is eternal or not delves into where you put your faith/trust/confidence in. Where ever that is: it had best be correct.
Similar complxity != similar properties (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:Define soul. (Score:1, Interesting)
It seems that soul is considered something like "genuineness" of a consciousness. Like in "If I was replicated in a receiving teleport unit, would my soul still be with me?", or in "If I could record and save complete state of my brain on a storage device and upload it into my clone's brain, would it still be ME, would I have my original soul?"
Also, "seven deadly sins", presumably leading to loss (death) of one's soul, are typically addictions that subjugate, or make predictable one's will. Obviously, theologians themselves are inclining to "genuineness" definition (if you are controlled by something, you have lost your soul).
If answers regarding teleportation and upload are "no", then "soul" is "continuity of consciousness", presuming that while consciousness is not present in the body, it must continue somewhere else, in spiritual world, out-of-body free space, heaven or hell, etc. Therefore, soul is our thought device to block out our fear of death (existence ending).
Saying that "X has no soul" merely means "I feel no empathy with X" ("I can't imagine how it feels to be X") or even "I can't differentiate between these Xs, so it must be they have no souls" (also naive popular presumption about the human clones, expressed even in "Star Wars" serial).
We ACs have no soul! :P
PS: There are only two possible outcomes from the search for the soul and resulting shift in ethics:
1) Everything has the soul (Animism) and then if we introduce science and information theory it is probably one common soul of whole reality (Pantheism) or a soul for each light cone, or a soul for each of many worlds (Each of us IS the God of own private world and everything around us has our own soul). Deal with the guilt! Try to exert as little damage to anything as you can (Buddhism).
2) There is no soul (Nihilism). Find yourself another explanation why you have empathy. Make a stand, admit you are soft and caring (Common sense)!
Either 1), or 2) tells us there is no EXTERNAL reason to be moral. We are moral, because it DOES US GOOD, because it is our own WILL (Nietzscheism ?), and last but not least, because it is better to not give other souls a good excuse to terminate our, well, MORTAL, soul (Well-adjusted psychopathy).
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand there are different sects of Buddhism with varying beliefs and practices, just curious if this belief marks a separation from mainstream Buddhist practice.
Re:What exactly *is* a "soul", anyway? (Score:3, Interesting)
"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.
Ray Batty (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's like saying someone is born knowing what an electron, a door, or ice cream is. Humans are capable of describing hitherto unimagined ideas using language. Language in a lot of ways is our vehicle of understanding. Even our thoughts often involve our language. You are right that our understanding of things comes from experience, but there is no indication that it comes from a magical land of pre-existence.
A computer can tell when two variables are 'perfectly equal' using simple methods. Even methods that can be learned. I've not done a lot of study on neural networks, but I really doubt it would be hard to train a neural network to confirm that two inputs are equal.
Re:Pointless... (Score:1, Interesting)
On one hand, I can look at the code for a machine at any time, regardless of complexity, to get to the details where procedure "self-awareness" or "feel_sad" is called.
If you could do that (find specific procedures for these things), then the machine would almost certainly *not* be self aware - nothing that was coded like this could really be flexible in the way humans are. It's much more likely that the machine would be effectively running a relatively simple low-level 'program' but with massively complex and opaque data values, and things like "self-awareness" could not be pinpointed in the code because they would effectively be distributed through the data.
Think of the human brain; and consider emulating it in silicon. The 'program' would just be the low-level neurone/synapse emulator/updater, which would be essentially the same for all humans and very similar to all other species. The 'sentience' would be dispersed in the data values representing the current firing states of and connection strengths between the neurones.
Now it's true that a sentient machine might not be that 'brain like' - it might have some completely different structure we haven't yet come across/invented. But it's just about informally provable** on complexity and other grounds that you couldn't get sentience by having procedures for things like self-awareness and rules for invoking them.
**Some good stuff on this exact theme is in Douglas Hofstader's book 'Godel, Escher and Bach' - AFAIK his take on John Searle's Chinese translator idea is relevant.
There probably isn't one, but if there is,they can (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Key concept: Measure (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Define soul. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what I'm saying - not that you're wrong, but that you've misread what the GP means. The word "swim" has several assumptions and connotations that, once we created submarines, turned out to separate the word from the effect of moving through water which was broader than we thought. Formerly, they were synonymous. The GP, to me, is saying that consciousness will be similar in that it will achieve the effects of consciousness without being quite what we mean by conscious. That doesn't mean that, like your example, someone might not create a machine that simulates it in the same way that your dolphin-machine swims, but there will be something else - a submarine of cognition - that exposes the limiitations of the term.