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+-   Ray Kurzweil: Can machines ever have souls? on Wednesday November 19 2008, @08:19AM Celery

Submitted by Celery on Wednesday November 19 2008, @08:19AM
matrix
Celery writes "Interview with Ray Kurzweil on silicon.com — talking up the prospects of gene therapy as a means to reverse human ageing, discussing different approaches to developing artifical intellgience, 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.""
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"This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon." -- Ronald Reagan, "People" magazine, December 26, 1985