Artificial Super Intelligence - are we ready for it?

I think for a machine to have feelings, we would have to be able to create an artificial equivalent to things that cause chemical reactions in our brains, such as hormones, that can create certain emotions, like - happiness, anger, pleasure and love. For instance, a machine might be programmed to provide a particular service, but unless there is an induced reward system to create a feeling of contentment or pleasure, there would never be any real self satisfaction for providing that service...conversely, there would also be no feelings of regret or anger either.

I also believe that is what a 'soul' is...everyone's own individual DNA and environmentally induced internal chemical factory.

(i'm probably vastly oversimplifying this...:) )
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Originally Posted by fred41

I think for a machine to have feelings, we would have to be able to create an artificial equivalent to things that cause chemical reactions in our brains, such as hormones, that can create certain emotions, like - happiness, anger, pleasure and love. For instance, a machine might be programmed to provide a particular service, but unless there is an induced reward system to create a feeling of contentment or pleasure, there would never be any real self satisfaction for providing that service...conversely, there would also be no feelings of regret or anger either.

I also believe that is what a 'soul' is...everyone's own individual DNA and environmentally induced internal chemical factory.

(i'm probably vastly oversimplifying this...:) )
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Or you could have a situation in which an AI becomes the perfect killer, programmed to do nothing else without a thought or an emotion involved, as indeed is the kind of AI one sees in those trashy films of recent years.

If I say that I find your definition of the soul unsatisfactory, it is equally unsatisfactory if I cannot produce a better alternative -perhaps the question is not what the soul might be, but whether or not it exists at all, something which science has failed to conclusively prove one way or another.

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Originally Posted by trish

Given the vast chaotic complexity of the world it seems perfectly reasonable to me that two identical artificial intelligences placed in distinct but similar environments might develop entirely different behavior patterns which ultimately cannot be explained in any satisfactory detail. One may write completely original poetry in its very own inexplicable style. The other may develop an obsession for money and power. Once the complexity of a dynamic system passes a certain threshold, it’s behaviors become effectively incalculable. At that point it’s useless to attempt to understand it on the level of switches and circuits. It is more readily understood on the more abstract level of it’s patterns of behaviors. Intentions, goals, and souls are higher level abstractions that clearly apply to the behaviors and personalities of the machines we call people. The question is, “Will it ever become appropriate to seriously apply these concepts to other machines?”

For me the worrisome part of AI is the possibility that some machines will have “souls” in the sense that we do; i.e. we feel, we love, we experience the world and are driven to create art, music, poetry that reflects our inner selves in reaction to those experiences. We are also machines. I see no reason other sorts of machines might not also experience the world in similar ways. The moral danger posed by AI is two-fold: 1) there is the possibility that we may refuse to extend our empathy to machines that deserve it; and 2) there is the possibility that we may grant personhood to machines that are not persons but simply passable simulations. (Btw in other circumstances I would find the phrase “passable simulation” somewhat toxic.)

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This is the kind of post that to me illustrates the weakness of science when it attempts to deal with the soul, because in fact if we are machines, then it is difference that is inexplicable, not poetry. To claim that it is "perfectly reasonable to me that two identical artificial intelligences placed in distinct but similar environments might develop entirely different behavior patterns which ultimately cannot be explained in any satisfactory detail" is gibberish. Either the AI are identical or they not, and surely it is precisely because the clothing and diet of the Inupiat is so different from the Masai that we try to understand both without resorting to a crude environmental determinism -A1 wears a lot of clothes because it is cold; A2 wears few clothes because it is so hot. It is true that from Roman Jakobson through Levi-Strauss to the universal pragmatics of Habermas, that studies of language have attempted to illuminate the structural affinities that human languages have with each other, and one could argue that most religions attempt to do the same thing and come up with structurally the same solution -that there is a perfect being and that it has created a system of punishment and reward for humans that helps societies survive without collapsing into chaos. But within all that, the unique signature of the creative artist begs the question: why is it even unique?

Scientists it seems to me, tends to reconfigure everything in the world in terms of mathematics- take as an example the famous Infinite Monkey Theorem in which a monkey, say a Chimpanzee sitting in front of a typewriter will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The theorem works on the level of maths or as we would put it today, algorithms, because there are only so many letters on a keyboard and in the works of Shakespeare and at some point in infinity all of the conceivable permutations would have been typed and there on the page you would have that famous phrase from King Lear: O, let me not be mad, not mad sweet heaven.

Now, suppose an AI is created that is formed as a robot or an android or whatever they are called these days, and into its computerised memory is fed the entire contents of the Library of Congress, the Bodleian, the Bibliotheque Nationale and so on- if this AI then produced a play, would it be original, more importantly, unique? Or would it be creative at all? Mozart used a formula to write music that had been established by Bach and Haydn, but even though he often repeated himself, because he was writing for money much of the time, Mozart stands out in a era of classical music because of those moments -to enthusiasts, exquisite moments- which only Mozart could have written -a blend of chords, a melodic line: it is this ability to creative something unique that others can still appreciate and understand that AI cannot produce, because a robot does not have a soul.

I agree that I would struggle to define what a soul is; a psychologist once admitted to me that his profession is unable to define a person, perhaps because humans can not only create a persona that is unique to them, but to create more than one -such as Michael on Monday who becomes Michelle on Friday, even if only in a nightclub.

So in fact, an AI might indeed have a 'soul', but could it ever have a soul?

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This is the kind of post that to me illustrates the weakness of science when it attempts to deal with the soul,...

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Indeed, I do not think science has much to say on the subject. There are few if any refereed papers in scientific journals which make any pronouncements on the existence or non-existence of souls.

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To claim that it is "perfectly reasonable to me that two identical artificial intelligences placed in distinct but similar environments might develop entirely different behavior patterns which ultimately cannot be explained in any satisfactory detail" is gibberish.

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I’m sorry that you find it so. Perhaps the claim lost clarity through my attempt to write tersely. The word “similar” is meant to convey something less than “identical”. So two identical machines in only similar environments will eventually (if they are designed to interact with the environment in significant ways) display divergent behaviors because of what is popularly known as the butterfly effect. Even were the universe to unfold in a deterministic way (which I don’t necessarily believe) it will be impossible over the long run to calculate and predict the precise ways in which the behaviors of the two machines will diverge. If the machines themselves were only similar, rather than identical, the problem of understanding, calculating and predicting with exactitude the nature of their divergence would be compounded. [Even a system as simple as the solar system is chaotic in this sense. The paths of the celestial bodies can only be reliably predicted over finite periods of time and they are subject to sudden and sometimes catastrophic interruptions from cosmic interlopers.]

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Scientists it seems to me, tends to reconfigure everything in the world in terms of mathematics- take as an example the famous Infinite Monkey Theorem in which a monkey, say a Chimpanzee sitting in front of a typewriter will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The theorem works on the level of maths or as we would put it today, algorithms, because there are only so many letters on a keyboard and in the works of Shakespeare and at some point in infinity all of the conceivable permutations would have been typed and there on the page you would have that famous phrase from King Lear: O, let me not be mad, not mad sweet heaven.

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It’s certainly difficult to deny the mathematics. But of course there are only a finite number of Monkeys on Earth and the expected amount of time it would take for them to randomly produce a line of Shakespeare exceeds the time it will take for the Sun to nova.

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Now, suppose an AI is created that is formed as a robot or an android or whatever they are called these days, and into its computerised memory is fed the entire contents of the Library of Congress, the Bodleian, the Bibliotheque Nationale and so on- if this AI then produced a play, would it be original, more importantly, unique? Or would it be creative at all? Mozart used a formula to write music that had been established by Bach and Haydn, but even though he often repeated himself, because he was writing for money much of the time, Mozart stands out in a era of classical music because of those moments -to enthusiasts, exquisite moments- which only Mozart could have written -a blend of chords, a melodic line: it is this ability to creative something unique that others can still appreciate and understand that AI cannot produce, because a robot does not have a soul.

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Should an machine other than a human being produce a play would it be unique? Does producing a play make a human being unique? I think we agree on the answer here. It doesn’t seem to me that the production of various works of art is sufficient proof of sentience. I’m not a subscriber to the Turing Test. I think people are prone to anthropomorphize and attribute human qualities to creatures (and perhaps things) that do not have those qualities. But this doesn’t prove that machines can’t be sentient or conscious. It only demonstrates the difficulty of deciding whether or not a particular machine is such. I know first hand that I am sentient. I have to take your word for it that you are sentient (and I do, even though we never met and you may be just a algorithm running on the internet). How do we decide the sentience of others?

Intention, desire, empathy, jealously etc. are some of the higher level concepts we employ when we attempt to understand why the people we encounter behave the way they do. When the boss fires you, you want to know what he’s thinking, not what neuronal complexes are firing. One high level concept some people seem to find useful in understanding other human beings is that of the “soul.” I never became very adept at the use of this concept. I don’t believe it brings very much to the discussion of poetry, painting, writing, creativity, moral and ethical philosophy, the meaning of life or the nature of consciousness and sentience. Those who subscribe to the notion seem to think that a physical system cannot be sentient, creative, loving and unique unless a divine being has installed a soul somewhere within it. At least there’s one thing upon which we can agree: one person’s gibberish is another person’s chatter.

Nobody with a trillion dollars to spend is going to want a soul or a play, or some poetry, if I want a soul to own I'll get a cat and give it food and neck rubs, he'll stick around.
If you build a computer you want one that is smart, smarter than the IBM computer WATSON who won on Jeopardy. You want one that can keep the North Koreans from hacking our computers, you don't want a master computer that decides we should go through channels and give Iran a few nuclear missiles in the pursuit of fairness.
A creative computer might earn some young genius a blue ribbon at the science fair to please his parents, but if you're going to put thousands of man hours and countless headaches into building a computer that can do anything, you're going to keep strict control over what it does, and you're going to want to get a return on your investment, whether it's ruling the stock market, or destroying ISIS.
Of course this is vastly oversimplified, but I'm sure there have been talks among the techs in the white coats about building a supercomputer to deal with national defense, as well as models for a smart car, pollution concerns, and just like the A-bomb, getting a genius computer before the Chinese do. WWIII is going to be fought in the banks. The trick will always be staying one step ahead of the competition.
Picasso, Shakespeare, Mozart....there's a lot of pain and death in their art. They accept the fact that there is nothing new under the sun.
The Atomic bomb was a little piece of sunshine right here on earth, under our control. A supercomputer will be a super high voltage powerhouse that always is on and never gets tired, in our control. If it ever becomes self aware, some technician is going to be in deep doodoo. The parents of a super computer will be greed and fear.

Robby the Robot ! Love those classic pic posts .

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if you're going to put thousands of man hours and countless headaches into building a computer that can do anything, you're going to keep strict control over what it does, and you're going to want to get a return on your investment, whether it's ruling the stock market, or destroying ISIS.

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That is exactly right. The things we tend to study and particularly the things we design are predictable. The computer you’re using to interface with HA does (by and large) what you tell it to do. But the complexity of the world is such that most interactions are not predictable to that degree. A small perturbation in input can yield exponentially divergent output. Essentially, in the real world if you do the same thing over and over again, you shouldn’t be surprised if you sometimes get different results. This is partly why siblings raised in the same environment by the same parents grow up with different interests, loves, personalities, talents and abilities; and also partly because they are not identical to begin with.

We encourage our children to be unique, creative and open to the possibilities of the world. We want our servants to be obedient and predictable. When we design machines, we design servants. But nature is not in business of producing servants and slaves for profit; and ultimately we are all of us, man and machine, products of nature. Shit happens.

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Originally Posted by trish

I’m sorry that you find it so. Perhaps the claim lost clarity through my attempt to write tersely. The word “similar” is meant to convey something less than “identical”. So two identical machines in only similar environments will eventually (if they are designed to interact with the environment in significant ways) display divergent behaviors because of what is popularly known as the butterfly effect. Even were the universe to unfold in a deterministic way (which I don’t necessarily believe) it will be impossible over the long run to calculate and predict the precise ways in which the behaviors of the two machines will diverge. If the machines themselves were only similar, rather than identical, the problem of understanding, calculating and predicting with exactitude the nature of their divergence would be compounded. [Even a system as simple as the solar system is chaotic in this sense. The paths of the celestial bodies can only be reliably predicted over finite periods of time and they are subject to sudden and sometimes catastrophic interruptions from cosmic interlopers.]

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It may be that I have a narrower concept of AI than yours, for example AI as something manufactured by a company which produces say 1,000 identical machines, and just as one expects every Apple Air to be the same whether it is bought in London or Chicago, so the AI produced by Stark Industries would all be identical down to the last detail. From this perspective, it is surely nonsense to believe that two identical machines will evolve in any sense or diverge as they are machines with a precise range of functions. The only way they could 'diverge' would be to acquire a mind just as we do, capable of being illogical in away that computers cannot be. Even a command to self-destruct is not illogical to a computer.

The deeper point is the old one about what it is that makes humans different from the other species we share this planet with. The mind or the soul remains the key to this, surely? And it again comes back to the fact that we all have the same working parts yet are also individuals. I don't see how a machine can be either designed or made which is as human as a human, and I am not sure I want AI as anything other than a mindless gadget doing what gadgets do, but that is also because I do not use the cloud, or dropbox, or have my light switches at home programmed to turn on when I open the door; I don't have a sophisticated oven that plays Mozart while heating a pie (the two don't go together anyway). So maybe the problem is that I am just too old..!

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It may be that I have a narrower concept of AI than yours, for example AI as something manufactured by a company which produces say 1,000 identical machines, and just as one expects every Apple Air to be the same whether it is bought in London or Chicago, so the AI produced by Stark Industries would all be identical down to the last detail. From this perspective, it is surely nonsense to believe that two identical machines will evolve in any sense or diverge as they are machines with a precise range of functions. The only way they could 'diverge' would be to acquire a mind just as we do, capable of being illogical in away that computers cannot be. Even a command to self-destruct is not illogical to a computer.

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Consider that at one time there was a single self-replicating molecule, a nano-machine. It spawned two identical daughters, who each spawned two identical granddaughters. During the course of a few billion years shit happened and the progeny are as divergent as any mind could possibly imagine.

I do find it somewhat amusing that people as celebrated as Stephen Hawking actually worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence. I do not find it very like that sentience can be totally explained as a digital construct, though I do think (indeed I would say know) that dynamical systems can be conscious (I’m one of them). My more immediate worries concerning AIs cluster around the economics of unemployment.

There is a slim possibility that we are both right (or both wrong, depending on how you look at it): There is a divine being and he uploads and installs into each human born a custom designed neural algorithm called a soul. Because it runs on flawed hardware (original sin) it’s prone to malfunction, and because it’s an abstract algorithm it’s immortal.

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Originally Posted by trish

I do not find it very like that sentience can be totally explained as a digital construct, though I do think (indeed I would say know) that dynamical systems can be conscious (I’m one of them). My more immediate worries concerning AIs cluster around the economics of unemployment.

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I have never thought of you before as a 'dynamical system' even if you do have a dynamic personality...I think you can do better than that.

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Originally Posted by trish

There is a divine being and he uploads and installs into each human born a custom designed neural algorithm called a soul. Because it runs on flawed hardware (original sin) it’s prone to malfunction, and because it’s an abstract algorithm it’s immortal.

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I do wish you would keep my flawed hardware out of the argument.

You would think that this divine-being had considered the flawed hardware and designed his/her algorithm to suit.

Some flawed robotic hardware with an evil designer

Evolution is reproduction through a noisy channel. The flaws are essential :)

Without perturbations, there would be no variety and no progress.

“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”

― Sir Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Webster- INTELLIGENCE -the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations

Intelligence is not an entity unto itself, it's like a zero in math, it only has value when you add it to a number.

Even without a super computer, if you gave a really smart ethical guy complete dictator control over the United States, you could probably fix the military, IRS, budget, etc etc etc in one year. Just impose martial law and make the changes any idiot can see needs to be made.

The Big Bang was caused by a small flaw in the universe, made it spew out all over the place, but it's all a big mistake, the perfect universe still exists, about the size of a softball, spaceless and timeless, and formless in my head. You have to be beyond stupid to see it, you practically have to cut off blood flow to your brain.

It's possible the USA already has a super duper computer or alien technology, and we're waiting for a really good occasion to unveil it. Gotta keep it top secret, ya know. Lives are at stake.

Interesting theories. Not being an idiot, I can't understand it all

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Originally Posted by buttslinger

about the size of a softball, spaceless and timeless, and formless in my head. You have to be beyond stupid to see it, you practically have to cut off blood flow to your brain.

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Anything you have to see without much blood in your brain is more likely a hallucination than the perception of real phenomena. It's just as likely to be a manifestation of aberrant neural activity than a valid percept. If we develop computers capable of generating ideas, let's hope the ideas relate to things that actually exist or could exist.

I was prescribed a toxic dose of a medication once and when I woke up the next morning I saw a translucent spider crawling towards me through the air. I was fully aware it was not an actual spider, but it had all of the qualities of a spider in appearance, save for its translucence. This softball sounds about as real as that spider (even if you meant it as a metaphor I don't know what you mean):).

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Originally Posted by buttslinger

Intelligence is not an entity unto itself, it's like a zero in math, it only has value when you add it to a number. .

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And not to be pedantic, but zero does not have value when you add it to a number. Edit: I'm guessing you mean as a placeholder, in which case, I guess it does.

If you add zero to six, the zero becomes a six,
If zero was sleep, and you added it to Jimmy, Jimmy might appear dumb as a post, completely worthless, yet Jimmy is still Jimmy.

Some people talk about trading all their treasures for a perfectly round pearl of great value. Or go off looking for a riddle, a dewdrop on the sea. A computer might do math thousands of times faster than me, or lots of other stuff better than me, a smart guy might be smarter than me about pretty much everything. But I value ME over them, because all the laws of physics and nature say I gotta be me. Reality trumps Intelligence.

I mean, really, most guys here can't get past a dude with tits and a pretty face, right? Is it real or a hallucination?

The value of zero is zero.
The value of zero plus six is six.
The value of six times zero is zero.
The value of six to the zero power is one.
The value of me equals the value you,
but our values can't be added, divided nor on a computer run.

Zero is simply the identity element of the additive group canonically embedded within the complete real closed field. Our field is open, our identity incomplete.

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Originally Posted by trish

The value of me equals the value you,
but our values can't be added, divided nor on a computer run.

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So we are not machines, and we have souls -unique souls?

Not all machines are digital computers. The brain has aspects of a neural net, but it's not temporally synchronized, nor completely digital in all of its aspects. This doesn't mean you aren't a physical system. But all that is beside the point: my comment on Buttslinger's post is about value, not the origins of sentience. I'm merely suggesting that the values we attach to things aren't always numbers, or even abstractions that can be easily compared. What, for example, was the value Bikini Atoll before it was obliterated? The U.S. military may have attached a dollar amount to the value. Others would've been hard pressed to to express their value in those terms. But it doesn't mean the Bikini Atoll had a soul. Perhaps it did. Perhaps not. But to say it isn't an electronic digital computer and it has an incomparable value doesn't decide the issue.

Trish we are not really getting anywhere with this. Science can tell us so many things about the body, perhaps not as much about the brain as it would like, but is still floundering when it comes to explain why humans with the same constituent parts do not produce the same things over and over again, or rather, as in fact humans are very repetitive creatures, why one human can paint and another cannot, where a unique imagination separates his or her work from everyone else's. Whether you call it the mind or the soul, we are surely more than the sum of our parts. But why?

Stavros and Trish both love to LORD it over us with their engorged vocabularies, I think my only unfinished business here would be to hear Trish admit to at least the POSSIBILITY of a Universal God that starts to cook where our paths end.

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Originally Posted by buttslinger

Stavros and Trish both love to LORD it over us with their engorged vocabularies, I think my only unfinished business here would be to hear Trish admit to at least the POSSIBILITY of a Universal God that starts to cook where our paths end.

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Of course. Way up beyond the clouds in a parallel set of dimensions there may exist a race of spider-legged gods that creep along the cosmic web, oozing out the Nambu strings of which the universe is woven. We worshipfully commune with the awful Mother of that nest by the thin filaments upon which we tug with our prayerful thoughts. The trick is finding reason to believe such a thing and then to act meaningfully on that belief. Should some poor father stand accused of murdering his son because he thought the Web Mother bade him to do it, would you find him guilty or non-guilty by reason of insanity?

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Originally Posted by trish

Of course. Way up beyond the clouds in a parallel set of dimensions there may exist a race of spider-legged gods that creep ......, would you find him guilty or non-guilty by reason of insanity?

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I'd probably find him not guilty, if he killed his wife or business partner I'd find him guilty. Let's play hardball. Are you telling me that all the black people that go to Sunday School are ignorant?

A snow flake consists of nothing but H2O and yet each is unique. Why? Not because it has a soul, but because of the multitudinous variations physics allows in the formation of ice crystals and the multitudinous fluctuations in the ambient environment of these delicate lattices as they grow. So too with living creating creatures.

There are one hundred trillion neurons in a human brain. It would require two to the power of one hundred trillion bits of information just to describe with exactitude the physical state of that machine. Clearly we won’t ever be predicting human behavior on the level of neurons. To understand why humans sometimes write poetry we need higher level concepts. Perhaps ideas belonging to fields other than science. But clearly, with so many available biological variations and so much variation and fluctuation in our environment and our lives as we grow, mature and learn, it is natural to expect that when one human is found who writes poetry, not all will necessarily do so. Souls are not needed to understand the uniqueness of human beings. They may be needed to explain other things about humans, but I haven’t been told yet what that might be, or how such explanations work.

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Whether you call it the mind or the soul, we are surely more than the sum of our parts. But why?

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I’m not sure what “sum” means here. Surely it doesn’t mean the same as it does in arithmetic. Nor does it mean the same thing as “aggregate”, “collection” or “union.” We are not the mere collection of all of our parts, that’s for certain. But then, neither is a car engine. Take your car apart and put all the pieces into a huge box. It will no longer be your car. A car is not a simple sum of all of its parts. The parts of a car are integrated and interfaced in such a way that the state of the cars is intimately related by the laws of physics to the state of the car at later times.

The question of this thread is can human-designed, man-made machines achieve intelligence? sentience? and if so are they an existential danger to humans? You seem to think that no man-made machine will ever have a soul and so we will never have to grant such a machine our empathy, our sympathy, our respect etc. The hypothesis that thinking beings require divinely bestowed souls grants you a slam-dunk argument. I think it’s very unlikely that humans will ever create sentient machines, but I don’t have a slam-dunk argument that concludes no such thing is possible. Indeed I think our very existence illustrates the principle of a sentient physical system. So I can’t rule the possibility that we may want some day in the future to grant to some of our machines the same respect that we (ought to) afford others.

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Originally Posted by buttslinger

I'd probably find him not guilty, if he killed his wife or business partner I'd find him guilty. Let's play hardball. Are you telling me that all the black people that go to Sunday School are ignorant?

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We are all sadly, sadly ignorant. To address your question more directly, many Sunday School attendees have Faith, which ultimately presupposes a kind ignorance...doesn't it?

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Originally Posted by trish

We are all sadly, sadly ignorant. To address your question more directly, many Sunday School attendees have Faith, which ultimately presupposes a kind ignorance...doesn't it?

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Nobody on earth has a Faith that sees beyond personal ignorance?

[QUOTE=trish;1618193]
A snow flake consists of nothing but H2O and yet each is unique. Why? Not because it has a soul, but because of the multitudinous variations physics allows in the formation of ice crystals and the multitudinous fluctuations in the ambient environment of these delicate lattices as they grow. So too with living creating creatures.
There are one hundred trillion neurons in a human brain. It would require two to the power of one hundred trillion bits of information just to describe with exactitude the physical state of that machine. Clearly we won’t ever be predicting human behavior on the level of neurons. To understand why humans sometimes write poetry we need higher level concepts. Perhaps ideas belonging to fields other than science. But clearly, with so many available biological variations and so much variation and fluctuation in our environment and our lives as we grow, mature and learn, it is natural to expect that when one human is found who writes poetry, not all will necessarily do so. Souls are not needed to understand the uniqueness of human beings. They may be needed to explain other things about humans, but I haven’t been told yet what that might be, or how such explanations work._

-I understand this argument, and I can see how powerful it is. Take, for example, babies who emerge from the womb without the clearly defined genitals humans ought to have, or who do not have all of their limbs or organs, or who are in some way -terrible expression I know but -'not perfect'. In many cases a genetic explanation will focus on the quality of the father's sperm, whether or not the man and woman were closely related, had medical or genetic problems of their own, and so forth. Science can as you suggest explain that genes are not all identical and that this will result in humans who are physically different from their parents.
However-

I’m not sure what “sum” means here. Surely it doesn’t mean the same as it does in arithmetic. Nor does it mean the same thing as “aggregate”, “collection” or “union.” We are not the mere collection of all of our parts, that’s for certain. But then, neither is a car engine. Take your car apart and put all the pieces into a huge box. It will no longer be your car. A car is not a simple sum of all of its parts. The parts of a car are integrated and interfaced in such a way that the state of the cars is intimately related by the laws of physics to the state of the car at later times.
-This I think is a weak argument, because two cars being driven off the production line must be exactly the same, so that the Ford I take possession of in say, Birmingham, is the same vehicle as the one John takes possession of in London. Just as I would expect an Apple Mac purchased in one shop to be the same as one purchased in another. Machines that have been designed down to the last rivet and chip surely cannot be subject to 'genetic' modification as humans can be?

The question of this thread is can human-designed, man-made machines achieve intelligence? sentience? and if so are they an existential danger to humans? You seem to think that no man-made machine will ever have a soul and so we will never have to grant such a machine our empathy, our sympathy, our respect etc.
-I don't see why a human should be upset if the kettle leaks, and cradle it as a consequence. Brutal as it sounds, I throw that kettle away and buy a new one. I don't do lullabies for vacuum cleaners. Can machines be designed that switch themselves on and make the tea just before you wake up? Yes of course, but it is still dependent on electricity, and on a human putting water and tea in the machine. Can computers be programmed to switch themselves on and perform functions? Yes, but at one point do they 'think for themselves'? To me this is science fiction, but also illogical. I don't see how a machine can evolve by itself, and do not think that AI can make the leap from human dependency to autonomy.

The hypothesis that thinking beings require divinely bestowed souls grants you a slam-dunk argument. I think it’s very unlikely that humans will ever create sentient machines, but I don’t have a slam-dunk argument that concludes no such thing is possible. Indeed I think our very existence illustrates the principle of a sentient physical system. So I can’t rule the possibility that we may want some day in the future to grant to some of our machines the same respect that we (ought to) afford others.
-This is where science and religion cannot meet. Science will argue that the child has a genetic disorder where a religious person will say it is karma, or God's Will. Science is satisfactory when it comes to the physical, but is still struggling to explain the autonomy of the person, of an identity that can be shaped in spite of their bodily reality, such as Michael, who on weekends is Michelle. But religion does not really explain it either, since the conclusion that a situation is 'God's Will' is to me a meaningless statement as I do not know how anyone can know God's Will, not least because this God seems to will things for one person that are opposed by another claiming the same authority.

As I suggested, we are not really making progress with this, although I do think it is an interesting thread.

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Originally Posted by buttslinger

Stavros and Trish both love to LORD it over us with their engorged vocabularies, I think my only unfinished business here would be to hear Trish admit to at least the POSSIBILITY of a Universal God that starts to cook where our paths end.

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I would not want to Lord it over you, I hope you agree to that. As for Gods' cooking, I think, on the evidence of the last 5 billions years, one might be inclined to say 'Too much salt, guv'nor.'

Trish said,

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I’m not sure what “sum” means here. Surely it doesn’t mean the same as it does in arithmetic. Nor does it mean the same thing as “aggregate”, “collection” or “union.” We are not the mere collection of all of our parts, that’s for certain. But then, neither is a car engine. Take your car apart and put all the pieces into a huge box. It will no longer be your car. A car is not a simple sum of all of its parts. The parts of a car are integrated and interfaced in such a way that the state of the cars is intimately related by the laws of physics to the state of the car at later times.

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Stavros replied

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-This I think is a weak argument, because two cars being driven off the production line must be exactly the same, so that the Ford I take possession of in say, Birmingham, is the same vehicle as the one John takes possession of in London. Just as I would expect an Apple Mac purchased in one shop to be the same as one purchased in another. Machines that have been designed down to the last rivet and chip surely cannot be subject to 'genetic' modification as humans can be?

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It would be a weak argument were its aim to prove we cannot make machines that behave predictably (at least within a reasonable degree of tolerance) in predictable situations; but the example was put forward to illustrate that even cars are not just a simple sum of their parts, thus undermining the position that humans must have souls because each human is more than the sum of her parts.

Let me paraphrase the greater-than-argument. It goes like this. You are more than the sum of your parts. The extra bit (the difference between you and the sum of your parts) must be your soul.

The argument is clearly not meant to apply to cars. To avoid such an application, the premise must interpret the word “sum” in a crucially different way and in doing so, it (the premise) assumes the conclusion (you have a soul) rather than proves it. This logical fallacy is called, “begging the question.”

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-I don't see why a human should be upset if the kettle leaks, and cradle it as a consequence. Brutal as it sounds, I throw that kettle away and buy a new one. I don't do lullabies for vacuum cleaners. Can machines be designed that switch themselves on and make the tea just before you wake up? Yes of course, but it is still dependent on electricity, and on a human putting water and tea in the machine. Can computers be programmed to switch themselves on and perform functions? Yes, but at one point do they 'think for themselves'? To me this is science fiction, but also illogical.

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Of course I’m not arguing that kettles and vacuum cleaners are sentient; only that some machines are (e.g. us) and that there is a possibility that humans might someday craft sentient machines (not that I think they actually will do so, especially anytime soon).

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I don't see how a machine can evolve by itself, and do not think that AI can make the leap from human dependency to autonomy.

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Nothing “evolves” by itself; but is induced to evolve by way of myriad of interactions with a complex and chaotic environment. A single human being modifies her outlook on the world and her responses to it not because she is possessed by a divine spirit or is in possession of a soul, but because she interacts with and is influenced by the world around her.

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-This is where science and religion cannot meet. Science will argue that the child has a genetic disorder where a religious person will say it is karma, or God's Will. Science is satisfactory when it comes to the physical, but is still struggling to explain the autonomy of the person, of an identity that can be shaped in spite of their bodily reality, such as Michael, who on weekends is Michelle. But religion does not really explain it either, since the conclusion that a situation is 'God's Will' is to me a meaningless statement as I do not know how anyone can know God's Will, not least because this God seems to will things for one person that are opposed by another claiming the same authority.

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Let me reiterate that my views in this thread shouldn’t be taken as those of Science. I think we agree that neither science nor “God’s will” satisfactorily explains the phenomena of sentience nor the apparent autonomy of persons. I would extend this judgment of explanatory failure to the soul-hypothesis as well. Given the state of our scientific, theological and philosophical knowledge, shouldn’t we leave open the possibility that some machines might be sentient by virtue of the physical integration of their parts and their complex interaction with an enormous, chaotic and hugely varied world?

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Originally Posted by trish

Of course I’m not arguing that kettles and vacuum cleaners are sentient; only that some machines are (e.g. us) and that there is a possibility that humans might someday craft sentient machines (not that I think they actually will do so, especially anytime soon).

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I actually agree with a lot of what you propose, but not the quote above, I just find it too cold (too soulless?) to be described as a machine. It is as cold as that quote attributed to Stalin: the death of an individual is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.
Not a scientific response, I know, but probably the cause of the doubts I have that AI/man-made machines will evolve by themselves. I don't know if it is because I grew up in a world where most people did not have a tv, where computing was rare and robots associated with the B films we saw at Saturday Morning Pictures. But even with the profound changes to AI, I still can't see beyond the buttons and lights. Maybe it's just my age.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying sentience is a matter of computation. The modern theory of computation is a branch of mathematics. Not too long ago it went by the name Recursion Theory. It was founded by Turing, Godel, Church, Kleene and others as a sub-branch of mathematical logic within the field of pure mathematics. Were sentience simply a computational matter, an emergent property of a class of Turing machines (or their equivalent), then the study of consciousness would be reduced to a branch of pure mathematics. There would be no experiments to perform; just definitions to delineate and theorems to prove. For no good reason, my intuition runs counter to this. I do not think mathematics alone can encompass what we call sentience.

I think of sentience as a natural phenomenon. To me the world is not cold. It is complicated; complex to the point of being incalculable. It is a web of difficult and incomprehensible things: matter, energy, spacetime, fields and all the things embedded within and constituted by these things; all interacting in quantum bizarre and geometrically convoluted ways. Mathematics is cold and abstract. The world of things is hot, vast and filled with possibility.

Perhaps our difference just lies in what we understand a machine to be. For me, just about anything in the natural world that transitions from one state to the next according to natural laws as it interacts with the world is a machine. I’m inclined to the intuition that everything in the world belongs to the world (i.e. is natural). You, perhaps, are inclined to the intuition that some things (souls in particular) do not (i.e. some things are supernatural).

Perhaps we simply disagree on what “natural” means. I’m inclined to think that should it be proven that humans have souls (I’m not holding my breath), then through that proof we will have some footing toward working out how souls interact with their hosts, with each other and the rest of the world. We will begin to discover how they fit and function in the natural world; i.e. souls themselves would be understood, not as supernatural, but natural entities that belong to the world and arise from the natural world. Your inclination may be to draw a line and divide existence between the natural and the unnatural. Mine is to erase the line and let nature encompass all.

Even allowing for these different perspectives, our disagreement on the existence of souls currently remains a substantial one.

So we do not understand fully how our brains work, we do not understand fully the influence of nature and nurture, but we can observe the amazing similarities of identical twins who are raised apart. Nature – our genetic base – probably has more influence that we think.

So individuals are different in behaviour and beliefs; that is understandable. We do exhibit, or we believe we do, freewill.

If there are gaps in our observable knowledge then why jump to filling in this gaps with something called the soul? What is our evidence? It is a seemingly useful handle to cover our ignorance. But that is exactly what it is, something that keeps us ignorant.

A person is given a genetic blueprint and so a starting course is already written out...but prenatal and postnatal environmental effects further shape a person whose every decision during his/her early life can alter his/her personality and who they 'are'.
A person with an identical twin with developed schizophrenia has, if I read it correctly, a 48% chance of also having the disease based on genetics. Compared to the average person this is quite high, but note that it also means the person has a more than half a chance of not getting the sickness (or activating it). Doctors believe prenatal conditions, early childhood diseases, high levels of stress, substance abuse, avoiding social interactions...in other words - environmental factors, all play a strong role in whether or not a person with a predisposition to the illness will actually develop it. My point is that - how a person develops emotionally can be tweaked in so many nuanced ways, by so many factors that the explanation of a 'soul' is almost entirely unnecessary. How the mind and body develop is complex because living beings are complex. (BTW do identical twins share the same soul that was split?)
There is no proof that an actual souls exists. It's just another one of those things that no one ever saw, felt, heard or tasted...but someone first came up with the idea, somewhere in time and now people continue to believe in it based on faith. Sure, science can't disprove the existence of a soul...but it can't disprove the existence of pixies either...they're just real good at hiding.
There is no war between 'science' and religion. Science is a tool, a continuous gathering of information. Religion is faith in the supernatural...it's spiritual.
But people will always believe what they want to believe...they prefer romance to facts. It's why Uri Geller still cons people even though James Randi has shown him to be a fraud.
We don't understand everything in life and we may never completely understand life itself. To that end I guess you can use the word "soul" to mean - the thing that gives a person the spark of life, much as Victor Frankenstein's monster used electricity...the energy that activated him.
But that's not the same as defining the word soul as a spiritual mass of feeling and personality...that is, in fact, the 'real' person, with or without flesh.
The earth is an incredible place when you think about it...even in that 'cold' scientific way. Everything plays a part in everything else....and it's incredible how cells, organisms, beings adapt and change as is necessary for life...souls or not. God or not.
I no longer believe in a monotheistic God.
but I still feel wonder when I see a deer or a family of foxes...or a shooting star...or hold someones hand. I don't need the added romance or poetry of faith in a higher being. What's in front of me in this life is good enough for me.

Went a bit off track there. To bring it back in context of the thread, I would say, I don't have a problem labeling the power that an artificial sentient being uses to stay 'alive' being labeled a 'soul'. But a consciousness would be something different all together.

By way of responding to the various posts above, I should apologise for not always being coherent on this subject. It is something I have occasionally thought about, but probably because I shall not live long enough to see the quantum leaps in computing/AI that we are promised, I tend to think about AI as a social issue, such as the mechanisation removing humans from the production of commodities, and the challenge this poses for the state, so that it is more political than scientific.

I tend therefore to think of this by using cars and computers as examples: if I buy two Apple laptops I expect both of them to function in the same way, as man-made machines designed to be identical in every way. Trish makes the valid point that while humans can be viewed as machines with the same working parts, in reality, just as two snowflakes made by the same process look different, the multiplicity of neurons and other components to a human mean that like snowflakes we will be simultaneously the same but different, just as apparently, twins can exhibit remarkable duplications of thought feeling and behaviour, even if in some other aspects they retain a degree of individuality. One notes, as an aside, that in some ancient cultures, twins were considered a curse or a calamity to the extent that one of the two might be killed at birth. Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972, page 56) uses this in his discussion of mimesis as both a building block of human societies but also one of its potential weaknesses, as it leads to envy, covetousness and its expression in violence.

The argument in science that the 'soul' does not exist because observer-dependent science has not found it has been challenged by some scientists. Thus, in an article in Psychology Today Robert Lanza points out that 'weirdness' is as much a part of quantum theory as rationality, thus:
While neuroscience has made tremendous progress illuminating the functioning of the brain, why we have a subjective experience remains mysterious. The problem of the soul lies exactly here, in understanding the nature of the self, the "I" in existence that feels and lives life.

Scientists do rely on probablity rather than evidence as an explanation for phenomena that they know is happening but which cannot be seen, yet this is not considered irrational or 'unscientific'. Whether or not Lanza is stretching the boundaries to include 'the soul' in science you can judge for yourself here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...dence-says-yes

The social level at which this becomes interesting to me relates to the issue of social change and what Marx called the 'means of production' and the 'social relations of production'. Marx relied to a great extent on a flawed processional view of history which begins with primitive communism, and moves through revolutionary phases to feudalism, to capitalism (mercantile capitalism followed by industrial capitalism and for some later thinkers monopoly capitalism etc) to socialism and ultimately to communism, thereby reproducing in material terms Hegel's concept of consciousness as something that begins as nothing and through multiple stages of challenge and change matures and grows until it expands to a state of absolute consciousness that has been described as 'Hegel's journey toward the sunlight', but which might in other terms be Nirvana.

Crucially, what Marx attempted to do in volumes 1 and 2 of Capital was to show how human beings who had at one time made their own tools, farmed the land for their food, made their own clothes from animals and crops, etc, find themselves in capitalist societies where their tools and their expertise has been transformed into a significantly more productive machine, to which they have become merely an appendage, required to push buttons or perform the same menial task a million times in a 16 hour day. Marx believed this mode of production -in his case, factory production- and the social relations in which it took place, created a form of reification in which the relationship of people takes on the appearance of a relationship between things, or to put it another way, human communities defined by human identity are replaced by networks of monetized linkages. Marx believed Hegel had consciousness upside-down, and that rather than seeing everything as a product of the mind, Marx saw the material world as the source of consciousness and thus argued that the dehumanization of the worker in a factory was possible because the worker's consciousness of himself as a free person had been crushed, he became a wage-slave -but that by bringing a collective of workers together in one place, a 'working class' or 'collective consciousness' became possible which, if becoming political, could revolutionize both capitalist production and social relations, and push human society out of capitalism and into a wholly new experience of life.

Curiously, Marx also seems to see humans as machines, in the sense that the working class is forced to do the same mechanical things all day and every day, and also sees collective action as the source of hope for revolutionary change, where history suggests that the kind of revolution Marx advocated has ended up creating societies where individual identity is considered such a threat to the organization and survival of the state that such people are physically removed either through murder, or by sending them to the Gulag.

But does not religion also impose collective identity on individuals, and go further to argue that to be a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim etc, does not just mean believing the same things, but behaving in the same way? Is this a way in which human beings are again presumed to be 'merely machines' by movements which claim to have identified the author of the body and the soul? Religions may not describe their believers as machines, but seem to think they should behave in an identical or regimented manner -to attend Synagogue or Mass, or Friday prayers, to fast at a particular time and so on. To believe man and woman are the 'natural' order of things and that any other variation is a violation of 'God's law'.

So that in practice, science and religion actually converge on a wide range of beliefs and practices. And for the most part, it seems to be either a denial of diversity and individuality -communism, religion- or a denial that the self even exists other than as the behaviour of molecules and neurons in the brain transformed into language.

From this point of view, the soul need not be a separate thing from the body, but the means whereby an individual exercises the reflexivity of thought and feeling that enables that individual to make decisions -practical, moral etc- some of which are determined by the body, some by society, but some by an unseen probability which enables us to identify one person as different from another, just as it enables two men, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, to write at the same time indeed, on the same day, but with different degrees of literary and theatrical skill.

Taken into AI, the only way a machine could become 'sentient' would be if a human were to interfere with a design whose intention is to limit a machine's functions and give it the power to expand into an autonomous AI 'creature', just as in literature and film robots who rebel, or 'resurrected dinosaurs' who become carnivorous have been made that way, by mad scientists or through greed. One notes, as an aside, that Robots don't tend to be interested in world peace or love and compassion, but that must be a reflection of their creators prejudice.

But in a world which wants to re-clone the woolly Mammoth, re-introduce wolves into Britain (no thanks!), maybe the ultimate question is not, can we trust machines, but can we trust humans? After all, we have invented nuclear weapons, and continue to develop them, as if we were sleepwalking into our own destruction.

Finally, given that for some the soul is the proof of eternal life, is it not the case that a computer could in theory function for an eternity -at least as long as the sun shines?

ATTENTION SOULESS BASTARDS!!!

Greetings and Salutations to you all!

Religion is the opiate of the people-K Marx

INDEED


If only one person who ever walked the face of the earth was a witness to GOD, the God exists. Period.
Not the God who left you high and dry when you really NEEDED that bicycle in third grade, not the God that people believe in but don't understand, THE GOD.
I am not saying that everyone should run off to a Zen Monastery, I'm saying if you spent eight years of your life training to be a Marathon runner, and you achieved your goal by winning the Olympics, then all that stupid training and sacrifice might have been worth the effort and time spent. To you. The fact that the losers in the stands around you couldn't fully understand it wouldn't mean much, but you probably would wish that they could understand what you were feeling.
Even people that have seen God don't understand it, It surpasses understanding. Just because you can't put it in a test tube ,,,blah blah blah.

I am ancient enough to remember reading that egg farmers had some site on the internet that would instantly bring them every mention of the word "EGG" in the daily papers. (early google)
And reading that airplane designers didn't need wind tunnels because they could do those tests on a computer.
For me, that's pretty good, the fact that humans have their greasy fingerprints all over keyboards and internets is good. Computers enhance human intelligence.
Of course they also made it possible for some pricks to steal my Mom's IRS return.
Just like God is our Father, Computers are looking like they will be the father of our puny brains, the destinations our logic would go to if we had the ability to go that far and fast. So that's pretty exciting. I can't imagine any computer that wouldn't have guys plugged into it, and so far, yeah, Self Aware Computers exist only in the imaginations of science fiction writers. If some computer pushes the button that launches all the ICBMs in the American arsenal, I would still call that human error.

Even if by chance some electrical aura becomes self aware, I doubt it would destroy the human race or even care about the human race. We tend to be very foolish about our own importance.