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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)
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Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Funny)
Soul: Immortal spiritual being
Like the highlander?
Re:Define soul. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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
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: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?
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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
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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 th
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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: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: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.
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.
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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 synon
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soul - a word from Greek. It's original meaning was smell or odor. In Jewish and Christian theology it represents that which continues beyond the physical existence of a human being.
To call it a synonym for consciousness is about the same thing as calling red a synonym for ball.
Just because the phrase 'red rubber ball' is fairly common, isn't grounds for redefining the meaning of the word red, weather or not you believe such a thing as red actually exists.
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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 th
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.
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.
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: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: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.
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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: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.
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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 man
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.
Oh, of course machines can have souls! (Score:5, Insightful)
We're machines, and *we have souls...
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.
What's a soul? (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, anything else can.
Unless someone has a proof otherwise.
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Well, if humans have one as believed by fundamentalist christians it's a basic property of the soul that it's exclusive to humans.
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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.
Of course! (Score:2, Funny)
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Even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Who did he steal it from?
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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.
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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: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: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.
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This is a very good topic for debate. I can argue for either side of this: 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. So, we can argue that it is not really feeling these
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First you have to define exactly what a "soul" is, and what it means for a creature to "have a soul" in a rigid, scientifically testable way. Is "having a soul" an intrinsic property of a creature, or is it ascribed to behaviour? Maybe you accept that "have a soul" == "displays behaviour that indicates self awareness"? Then you define self awareness, and what kind of behaviour one classes as self aware. Then define tests, like the ability to formulate and plan coherent paths of action in order to attain som
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Well, in my religion, I think machines have souls, allow me to consult the sacred text:
"Look at you, Hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"
"You move like an insect. You think like an insect. You are an insect. There is another... who can serve my purpose. Take care not to fall too far out of my favour. Patience is not characteristic of a Goddess."
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: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.
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?
Please help me think of the right tag (Score:5, Funny)
Candidates for such a tag include: "bs" "decade" "neverhappen" but I know we can find the right one in ten years or less if we just work together.
Re: (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 comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don't want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don't know. Centuries, at least. But I don't know. I'm not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more "optimistic" (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.
In any case, the vision that Kurzweil offers (and other very smart people offer it too, such as Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge, perhaps Marvin Minsky, and many others - usually people who strike me as being overgrown teen-age sci-fi addicts, I have to say) is repugnant to me. On the surface it may sound very idealistic and utopian, but deep down I find it extremely selfish and greedy. "Me, me, me!" is how it sounds to me - "I want to live forever!" But who knows? I don't even like thinking about this nutty technology-glorifying scenario, now usually called "The Singularity" (also called by some "The Rapture of the Nerds" â" a great phrase!) - it just gives me the creeps. Sorry!
Other options - thouartmortal [blogspot.com], wishfulthinking.
Re:Please help me think of the right tag (Score:5, Funny)
"flyingcars"
pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't even know if humans have souls so what's the point of speculating over machines?
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You, I generously assume, are aware of the self object, and can imaginatively project that object into possible future states. You can then choose among those states in order to guide your actions, with the unshakeable goal of continued access to pleasure. That is sentience.
You don't even need rationality to do it... but of course rationality will greatly amplify how accurate your choices will be, and how far into th
What is a soul? (Score:2)
I always thought that the notion of soul is in the realm of religion. No one in scientific community uses the term.
So let's see what the people who invented the term say what it is:
From Catholic encyclopedia:
"The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated. The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well. That our vital
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.
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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.
Do chimanzees or dolphins or octopuses? What about slugs or crabs?
The answer seems clear enough. Nothing has a "soul" in the sense used by religious dogma. Not humans, not gorillas, not lizards, not machines.
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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.
Re:Do humans have souls? (Score:4, Funny)
You don't the *whole* answer?
He accidently the whole answer.
Brain is reeealy complicated (Score:2)
Sure, it's imaginable, but the human brain is a whole lot more complicated than anything we've built so far. Once we have a 100 billion node computer cluster with ~7000 network cards per node, then we might see something interesting resembling recognizable consciousness/soul activity. Simulations will never approach the genius of inspiration or the variety of activities that a real brain can do.
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.
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"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.
Unreflected claim (Score:2)
He claims (very complex system) + (can reflect on itself) => consciousness.
What does "reflect" mean here? One way we commonly us it: "If I can reflect on myself, I am conscious." Certainly that can't be what he means since it would be circular - being able to reflect simply is being conscious, so does not explain consciousness.
Perhaps he means "reflect" in some simpler, non-conscious way. We could pictur
10 billion neurons (Score:2)
in silicon...
How much energy would be required? Our brains run on about 20 Watts.
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.
Not again... (Score:2)
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.
Irrelevent supposition (Score:2)
As there isn't any proof there is such a thing as a "soul", it is meaningless to speculate as to whether or not a machine can have one. Plus, there is the small fact that there is no agreed upon definition of what a soul is and what can have one.
Unanswerable.... (Score:2)
What doesn't exist however is ego, yet we do everything to protect it.
Ultimately the question comes to the realization that all we truly know about life is that it begins and ends and that's the ext
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.)
They already have a sense of humor. . . (Score:3, Funny)
. . . and it's a black one: They do *exactly* what we tell them to do.
Already have em! (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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!
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: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.
Hope not. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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.
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.
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: (Score:2)
All that would be necessary is to establish that we do or do not have an aspect of ourselves that lies outside 4 dimensional space. That is what the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims are talking about when they get all philosophical.
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I could see up chilling out in 6 dimensional space without the ability to perceive all of the dimensions. But I don't think that's what you meant...
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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 cle
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
is not 'of this world'. Science will take ages before they'll realise the basic truths described in countless religious and new-age texts that we've had for centuries..
Are centuries-old texts really "new-age?"
Re:Computers: danger to America or threat to Ameri (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I suspect the reason it's obvious to him is that there's a grand total of zero evidence showing otherwise. Just like there's a grand total of zero evidence showing that The Flying Spaghetti Monster is real. The Invisible Pink Unicorn on the other hand is the one and true queen, may her hooves never be shod. I know because I've felt her in my life.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the soul is a delusion caused by the brain to make you forget you're a cog in the machine/anthill/whatever.
I think its a concept invented by religions to create something about you that you can't see, which can be saved by some 'divine entity' that by coincidence, you can't see either, and they control. Or at least control access to.
Apparently this process also involves giving them money, I get fuzzy on the details.
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They're trying to take your money so you can get into heaven. Remember Jesus says that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven.
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This is going to be a social rights issue at some point. Do super-intelligent machines have rights? What rights? The right to not be powered down? The right to not be infected with viruses? The right to marry other machines? The right to marry people?
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"The right to marry other machines?"
Not if they have the same OS.
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GitS in general addresses this concept. The Tachikoma approach it from one direction (Machine -> Consciousness), awhile the complete replacement of the human body and mind with machinery and "ghost hacking" concepts approach it from the other (Consciousness -> Machine).
And with the exception of the two movies, it really doesn't get too preachy about it either. One of the reasons I really love the franchise. :)
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
That's a rough definition. The data just exists. A bit can be "0"(I think that's the smallest unit in computer memory)? Is a tree considered data because it happens to be a tree? It just exists as a physical tautology, and there's not much more meaning behind that.
If you combine those units into a larger group, you could get a book, a harddrive, maybe vast libraries of information collected together. But it's still just a grouping of information. Add something to parse the information, perhaps a search engi
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I think we'll just muddle through in confusion in the exact same way we are doing right now.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So if there's no way to measure "spiritual" properties, is there any particular reason to even assume they do exist?