Singularity IV: Section C Will Computers Become Super Human
......I must confess I was fascinated and revolted in turn by what Kurzweil has in store for us. It took me two years before I felt I could respond.
I could fall in love with a conscious computer, if it ever becomes conscious
Kurzweil glosses over some large, unjustified and unjustifiable assumptions. The first is that consciousness will automatically emerge past a certain threshold of complexity, however complexity is defined. So although computers today are not conscious, those made in a couple of decades from now might well be.
There is an equivalent assumption in biology that lowly organisms aren’t conscious, and only organisms above a certain evolutionary grade could be considered conscious, which is completely arbitrary. To me, all organisms are conscious, however ‘lowly’, simply because they all grow and develop autonomously and independently of us, and more importantly, they each have their own ‘purposiveness’ in life that cannot be subverted in an arbitrary way. If my computer one day should satisfy those criteria, then, and only then would I regard it as conscious, and treat it accordingly, and yes, could even fall in love with it. I don’t see that as a big problem.
The second large assumption Kurzweil makes is that the human brain is not only a ‘machine’ – subject to the laws of physics - but a machine of the same kind as a computer.
Invoking the ‘laws of physics’ isn’t much, because the ‘laws’ have changed and will change again as we find out more about the strangeness of matter and energy. It is just shorthand for ‘not by special creation’. But even if the human brain is subject to the laws of physics, it could still be a very different kind of machine from a computer. The organism, including the brain, is indeed a very special kind of ‘machine’.
In my book, The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms (1998) and elsewhere, I have described the organism as an autonomous, self-sustaining domain that stores and mobilises coherent energy over all space-time scales. In the ideal that approaches quantum coherence, every single part, down to the individual molecule, is so perfectly correlated with the whole that it is also maximally free. What makes it possible for the organism to achieve this state is the liquid crystalline continuum – the stuff of flesh and blood - that makes up its body (see box).
Kurzweil is also assuming that the human brain is identical to ‘mind’, which many philosophers will dispute. To me, it is like saying that music is nothing more than the amplitudes and frequencies of all the sounds made in succession, or that a painting is the rgb (red, green and blue) values of each pixel on the computer screen.
Then there are the related, subsidiary questions. Is ‘mind’ the same as a ‘person’? Will a ‘person’ really emerge in the machine? Is the body not part of the person?
What’s wrong with the computation view of mind and nature?
There’s one thing a ‘person’ is not. She’s not a static collection of software programmes stored in the hardware - the brain - whose function is to ‘process information’.
The information processing metaphor has taken over biology completely. Kurzweil is following Francis Crick, who first introduced the language of information technology into molecular biology, and gave rise to the most hard line genetic determinism – the idea that DNA determines everything that goes on in the development and behaviour of living organisms. Not coincidentally, Crick has since gone to work on ‘consciousness’, which he supposes to be "the activities of nerve cells in the brain". His book, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994) is a major contribution to the ‘mind as computer’ ideology.
It is interesting how the same set of ideas is bounced back and forth among the major disciplines in the mainstream, in an never-ending cycle of mutual reinforcement that becomes utterly impervious to invasion by outsiders or, more seriously, to contrary empirical findings.
Not just mind, but the whole of evolution is seen as computation.
"Evolution is a master programmer." Kurzweil writes, "The software programs have been all written down, recorded as digital data in the chemical structure of an ingenious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA…The master "read only" memory controls the vast machinery of life."
And more,
"The DNA code controls the salient details of the construction of every cell in the organism, including the shapes and processes of the cell, and of the organs comprised of the cells…The synchronized flexing of muscle cells, the intricate biochemical interactions in our blood, the structure and functioning of our brains, and all of the other diverse functions of the Earth’s creatures are programmed in this efficient code."
And how has all that come about? By the natural selection of random variations, which can be perfectly simulated on the computer. That’s what evolutionary algorithms are all about. You let different algorithms compete and the best wins. But no evolutionary algorithm has yet produced life. Nor has the much-touted random association neural network research produced anything like a robot that learns as the human infant or an animal learns.
James Watson seduced the public into spending billions on the human genome project by promising to reveal ‘the blueprint for making a human being’. But the myth of genetic determinism has been well and truly exploded as the human genome sequence was announced by chief sequencer Craig Venter, who has now gone on to run a not-for-profit organisation, as his pronouncement was definitely bad for business (see "Biotech fever burning, burning out" ISIS Report).
All the empirical observations in physiology, biochemistry and genetics are telling us that the brain, like the rest of the human body, is not divided into what one might call ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ ware. Everything is ‘wetware’ in more senses than one – dynamic, flexible and fluid, up to and including genomic DNA. The brain needs experience to develop adequately, to make and break connections, to change gene function and structure. Experience not only creates memory, but also changes the brain and the body in its entirety and in unique ways.
A person is more like an ongoing narrative in which ‘word’ is literally made ‘flesh’. She is created and recreated, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, as she goes about the business of living and experiencing. Every experience changes her whole being, and each encounter of apparently the same is not quite the same, even if one were to judge only by the firing patterns of nerve cells in the brain. ‘Memories’ are projections to the future.
As far as I can see, the downloaded ‘brain in the computer’ can, at best, be a frustrated psychotic without the flesh and blood body to live out her subjective experience. And the perfect, synthetic, ‘nanoengineered’ non-biodegradable body simply won’t do. Why? Because all our memories – constituting a substantial part of our downloaded person – are those of the flesh and blood being, which may have no means of translating into the non-biodegradable perfect body.
I could fall in love with a conscious computer, if it ever becomes conscious
Kurzweil glosses over some large, unjustified and unjustifiable assumptions. The first is that consciousness will automatically emerge past a certain threshold of complexity, however complexity is defined. So although computers today are not conscious, those made in a couple of decades from now might well be.
There is an equivalent assumption in biology that lowly organisms aren’t conscious, and only organisms above a certain evolutionary grade could be considered conscious, which is completely arbitrary. To me, all organisms are conscious, however ‘lowly’, simply because they all grow and develop autonomously and independently of us, and more importantly, they each have their own ‘purposiveness’ in life that cannot be subverted in an arbitrary way. If my computer one day should satisfy those criteria, then, and only then would I regard it as conscious, and treat it accordingly, and yes, could even fall in love with it. I don’t see that as a big problem.
The second large assumption Kurzweil makes is that the human brain is not only a ‘machine’ – subject to the laws of physics - but a machine of the same kind as a computer.
Invoking the ‘laws of physics’ isn’t much, because the ‘laws’ have changed and will change again as we find out more about the strangeness of matter and energy. It is just shorthand for ‘not by special creation’. But even if the human brain is subject to the laws of physics, it could still be a very different kind of machine from a computer. The organism, including the brain, is indeed a very special kind of ‘machine’.
In my book, The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms (1998) and elsewhere, I have described the organism as an autonomous, self-sustaining domain that stores and mobilises coherent energy over all space-time scales. In the ideal that approaches quantum coherence, every single part, down to the individual molecule, is so perfectly correlated with the whole that it is also maximally free. What makes it possible for the organism to achieve this state is the liquid crystalline continuum – the stuff of flesh and blood - that makes up its body (see box).
Kurzweil is also assuming that the human brain is identical to ‘mind’, which many philosophers will dispute. To me, it is like saying that music is nothing more than the amplitudes and frequencies of all the sounds made in succession, or that a painting is the rgb (red, green and blue) values of each pixel on the computer screen.
Then there are the related, subsidiary questions. Is ‘mind’ the same as a ‘person’? Will a ‘person’ really emerge in the machine? Is the body not part of the person?
What’s wrong with the computation view of mind and nature?
There’s one thing a ‘person’ is not. She’s not a static collection of software programmes stored in the hardware - the brain - whose function is to ‘process information’.
The information processing metaphor has taken over biology completely. Kurzweil is following Francis Crick, who first introduced the language of information technology into molecular biology, and gave rise to the most hard line genetic determinism – the idea that DNA determines everything that goes on in the development and behaviour of living organisms. Not coincidentally, Crick has since gone to work on ‘consciousness’, which he supposes to be "the activities of nerve cells in the brain". His book, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994) is a major contribution to the ‘mind as computer’ ideology.
It is interesting how the same set of ideas is bounced back and forth among the major disciplines in the mainstream, in an never-ending cycle of mutual reinforcement that becomes utterly impervious to invasion by outsiders or, more seriously, to contrary empirical findings.
Not just mind, but the whole of evolution is seen as computation.
"Evolution is a master programmer." Kurzweil writes, "The software programs have been all written down, recorded as digital data in the chemical structure of an ingenious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA…The master "read only" memory controls the vast machinery of life."
And more,
"The DNA code controls the salient details of the construction of every cell in the organism, including the shapes and processes of the cell, and of the organs comprised of the cells…The synchronized flexing of muscle cells, the intricate biochemical interactions in our blood, the structure and functioning of our brains, and all of the other diverse functions of the Earth’s creatures are programmed in this efficient code."
And how has all that come about? By the natural selection of random variations, which can be perfectly simulated on the computer. That’s what evolutionary algorithms are all about. You let different algorithms compete and the best wins. But no evolutionary algorithm has yet produced life. Nor has the much-touted random association neural network research produced anything like a robot that learns as the human infant or an animal learns.
James Watson seduced the public into spending billions on the human genome project by promising to reveal ‘the blueprint for making a human being’. But the myth of genetic determinism has been well and truly exploded as the human genome sequence was announced by chief sequencer Craig Venter, who has now gone on to run a not-for-profit organisation, as his pronouncement was definitely bad for business (see "Biotech fever burning, burning out" ISIS Report).
All the empirical observations in physiology, biochemistry and genetics are telling us that the brain, like the rest of the human body, is not divided into what one might call ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ ware. Everything is ‘wetware’ in more senses than one – dynamic, flexible and fluid, up to and including genomic DNA. The brain needs experience to develop adequately, to make and break connections, to change gene function and structure. Experience not only creates memory, but also changes the brain and the body in its entirety and in unique ways.
A person is more like an ongoing narrative in which ‘word’ is literally made ‘flesh’. She is created and recreated, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, as she goes about the business of living and experiencing. Every experience changes her whole being, and each encounter of apparently the same is not quite the same, even if one were to judge only by the firing patterns of nerve cells in the brain. ‘Memories’ are projections to the future.
As far as I can see, the downloaded ‘brain in the computer’ can, at best, be a frustrated psychotic without the flesh and blood body to live out her subjective experience. And the perfect, synthetic, ‘nanoengineered’ non-biodegradable body simply won’t do. Why? Because all our memories – constituting a substantial part of our downloaded person – are those of the flesh and blood being, which may have no means of translating into the non-biodegradable perfect body.
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