Assorted Links September 6th, 2010
Robin Hanson on Who Should Exist? and Ways to Pay to Exist.
IEEE Spectrum has an interview with Ratan Kumar Sinha, who designed India's new thorium reactor.
The popular website "The Big Think" has a couple transhumanist writers, Parag and Ayesha Khanna. Their latest article, Can Hollywood Redesign Humanity? continues forward the H+/Hollywood connection which has been promoted previously by Jason Silva and others. "Documentaries Ponder the Future" is another one of their articles.
More Moral Realism Debates
The discussions in the moral realism debate thread are still ongoing, after two weeks.
It would be nice to have the debate better broken down at Canonizer.
Moral Realism Debates with Hedonic Treader and David Pearce
The comments section of my SIAI call for volunteers has become home to an extensive debate on moral realism, the relationship between values and intelligence, and the moral implications of a timeless universe and discreteness of spacetime. The primary participants include "Hedonic Treader", Jonatas Müller, and David Pearce.
Regular readers are familiar with my moral anti-realist views and my emphasis that creating superintelligence with the expectation that it will discover complex values is a depressing sort of planetary suicide.
The moral anti-realist stance is not new. It's not so much a personal preference, as a statement about the structure of the world -- that there are no moral propositions which are true or untrue. "Thou shalt not kill", is not a part of the structure of the universe, just a rule humans evolved to encourage one another to follow, for obvious reasons.
"It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
-- David Hume, A Treatise Upon Human Nature (1740)
Moral anti-realism has been in the spotlight among transhumanists and singularitarians primarily because of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Less Wrong blog posts, which explain the relevant issues.
Here's David's argument:
One of the hallmarks of intelligence is the capacity to distinguish the important form the trivial. We wouldn’t describe a human who spent his life tiling his garden with paperclips as “intelligentâ€, even if he used some arcane mathematical formula to do so. At most, we’d say he was an idiot savant.
A value-nihilist will be unimpressed by this response. How can we have any idea what a posthuman superintelligence will find valuable? Why not paperclips? There isn’t any objective fact of the matter – no “truthbearer†to settle the issue.
In one sense, I’d agree. A posthuman superintelligence may value modes of experience and propositional content that we would currently find inconceivable. And of course human cultures display an amazing diversity of moral practices. In another sense, however, I think the value-nihilist response is profoundly mistaken. This is because – for reasons we can’t fathom – the universe does have an inbuilt metric of importance: the pleasure-pain axis. You can’t be mistaken about the importance of your being in agony: its importance is built into the very nature of the experience itself. For reasons science doesn’t understand, organic robots aren’t just zombies with utility functions. The existence of phenomenal agony is an objective fact about the world: the phenomenal experience of pain and pleasure occupies spacetime coordinates, and it’s as much an objective fact about the universe as the rest mass of the electron. If I – or a Ted Bundy – think paperclip tiling is more important than your agony, then this judgement is not just a moral limitation on our part, but also an intellectual limitation – a failure adequately to compare the aesthetic satisfaction derived from contemplating well-tiled paperclips with what it’s like to be in unbearable agony. By contrast, a full-spectrum Superintelligence – as distinct from a mere SuperAsperger – will presumably command an impartial “God’s-eye viewâ€, stripped of egocentric and anthropocentric bias. A Superintelligence will be able to compare and contrast the relative weights of all possible perspectives – and act accordingly. This means cosmic paperclip tiling is out: it’s dumb for humans – and dumb for posthumans too.
I am optimistic that experiments in Artificial Intelligence will verify the truth of moral anti-realism, probably with little remaining doubt, within the next decade or so. Some will naturally argue that machines' moral non-complexity derives from its lack of phenomenological experience, and that will remain a point of contention until we can experiment with a variety of human-machine hybrids and intermediates. However, I think the broad picture will be a moral realization analogous to the cosmic realization that we were just a tiny corner of the universe. Our moral universe is a tiny corner of the total possible moral universe, and our values are not particularly persuasive to anything but fellow humans.
Just because some morals and feelings are in-built for humans does not mean that they are universally persuasive. It is possible that humans both "discover" their own internal values and "invent" memetic structures around them. An appropriately designed Artificial Intelligence could also "discover" that its ultimate goal in life is to spin itself around like a top all day, and even feel that every conscious agent must enjoy the same thing, whether they argue otherwise or not.
Gary Marcus at Singularity Summit 2009: The Fallibility and Improvability of the Human Mind
Gary Marcus at Singularity Summit 2009 -- The Fallibility and Improvability of the Human Mind from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.
Gary Marcus Professor of Psychology at New York University, director of the NYU Center for Child Language, and author of The Birth of the Mind and Kludge.
David Chalmers at Singularity Summit 2009 in NYC: “Simulation and the Singularity”
David Chalmers at Singularity Summit 2009 -- Simulation and the Singularity from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.
Valid Transhumanist Criticism?
Lately, I've been seeing something interesting -- valid criticism of the transhumanist project. The concern is decently articulated by the people who are being paid to attack me and other transhumanists, over at The New Atlantis Futurisms blog, funded by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, "dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy". To quote Charles T. Rubin's "What is the Good of Transhumanism?":
While some will use enforcement costs and lack of complete success at enforcing restraint as an argument for removing it altogether, that is an argument that can be judged on its particular merits – even when the risks of enforcement failures are extremely great. The fact that nuclear non-proliferation efforts have not been entirely successful has not yet created a powerful constituency for putting plans for nuclear weapons on the Web, and allowing free sale of the necessary materials. In the event, transhumanists, like “Bioluddites,†want to make distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate uses of “applied reason,†even if as we will see they want to minimize the number of such distinctions because, as we will note later, they see diversity as a good. Of course, those who want to restrict some technological developments likewise look to some notion of the good. This disagreement about goods is the important one, untouched by “Bioluddite†name-calling. The mom-and-apple-pie defense of reason, science and technology one finds in transhumanism is rhetorically useful, within the framework of modern societies which have already bought into this way of looking at the world, to lend a sense of familiarity and necessity to arguments that are designed eventually to lead in very unfamiliar directions. But it is secondary to ideas of what these enterprises are good for, to which we now turn, and ultimately to questions about the foundation on which transhumanist ideas of the good are built.
Yes, diversity is good. But transhumanists have a problem. Diversity is so darn huge, and contains far far more of what would broadly be considered "hideous" than anything beautiful.
I approach the idea of "diversity" from an information theory based perspective. In such a perspective, "diversity" can be achieved by randomly rearranging molecules to achieve a new, unique, "diverse" state. In this view, if absolute freedom to self-modify became possible in a society with sophisticated molecular nanotechnology, then eventually a very large and exotic collective of wireheaded and partially wireheaded beings could emerge. It could be ugly, not beautiful. For a "real-world" example, look at how everyone had great expectations for SecondLife, then it "degenerated" into a haven of porn and nightclubs. While it's debatable whether a world of porn and nightclubs is a bad thing, it's obviously not what many in society would want, and I think that an optimal transhumanist future should be appealing to all, not just a few.
Simplistic libertarian transhumanism simply argues, "anything is possible, and everything should be". Pursued to its logical conclusion, that means that I should be allowed to manufacture a trillion cyborg nematodes filled with botulism toxin and just chill with them. After all, it's my own choice, what right do you have to infringe upon it? The problem is that that cluster of nematodes would become a weapon of mass destruction if launched into stratospheric air currents for worldwide distribution, and programmed to fall in clusters on major cities where they would inject their toxins into targets which they would navigate to via thermal sensing. My unlimited "freedom" could become your unlimited doom, overnight. The same applies to people in space with the ability to anonymously cloak and accelerate asteroids towards ground targets. Any substantial magnification in human capability raises the same "civil rights" issues.
Many transhumanist writings advocate simplistic libertarian transhumanism. I won't bother to list any by name, but they're all around.
A regular commenter here, Sulfur, recently articulated his objection to transhumanism, responding to my recent statement "The latter makes sense, the former doesn’t.", with regards to solving the flaws of the Homo sapiens default chassis:
The fundamental problem with that sentence is that transhumanists see human body as a problem to solve and they are quick to judge what is needed and what is not. If that would be for them to decide, we already would have done terrible mistakes in augmenting our bodies (â€Hell, we don’t need so many genes! let’s get rid of them!†hype-like attitude). Transhumanism uses imperfect tools to perfect human. That can easily lead to disaster. Besides, the most important issue is not weather small changes correcting some flaws are desirable, needed or wanted, but rather to what extend we can change human and not to commit suicide in ambitious yet funny way thanks to augmentation which would radically change our minds, creating new quality.
It's true -- we do see the human body as a problem to solve. After all, the human body can't even withstand 5 psi overpressure without our eardrums exploding, or intercept rifle bullets without severe tissue damage, which I consider unacceptable. Moving more in a mainstream direction, many transhumanists (a small group of less than 5,000 people with mainstream intellectual influence far beyond their numbers) agree that solving aging is a major priority. After all, Darwinian evolution did not have our best interests in mind when it designed us. As far as I am concerned, the question of whether the human body is a problem to be solved is obvious: it is. The question is not whether or not we need to solve it, but how.
The "how" question is where things can get sticky. Most of human existence is not so crime-free and kosher as life in the United States or Western Europe. Business as usual in many places in the world, including the country of my grandparents, Russia, is deeply defined by organized crime, physical intimidation, and other primate antics. The many wealthy, comfortable transhumanists living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Florida, Boston, New York, London, and similar places tend to forget this. The truth is that most of the world is dominated by the radically evil. Increasing our technological capabilities will only magnify that evil many times over.
The answer to this problem lies not in letting every being do whatever they want, which would lead to chaos. There must be regulations and restrictions on enhancement, to coax it along socially beneficial guidelines. This is not the same as advocating socialist politics in the human world. You can be a radical libertarian when it comes to human societies, but advocate "stringent" top-level regulation for a transhumanist world. The reason why is that the space of possibilities opened up by unlimited self-modification of brains and bodies is absolutely huge. Most of these configurations lack value, by any possible definition, even definitions adopted specifically as contrarian positions to try and refute my hypothesis. This space is much larger than we can imagine, and larger than many naive transhumanists choose to imagine. This is especially relevant when it comes to matters of mind, not just the body. Evolution crafted our minds over millions of years to be sane. More than 999,999 out of every 1,000,000 possible modifications to the human mind would be more likely to lead to insanity than improved intelligence or happiness. Transhumanists who don't understand this need to study the human mind and looming technological possibilities more closely. The human mind is precisely configured, the space of choice is not, and ignorant spontaneous choices will lead to insane outcomes.
The problem with transhumanism is that it has become, in some quarters, merely a proxy for the idea of Progress. Progress is all well and good. The problem is that the idea isn't indefinitely extensible. The human world is a small floating platform in a sea of darkness -- a design space that we haven't even begun to understand. In most directions lie Monsters, not happiness. Progress within the human regime is one thing, but the posthuman regime is something else entirely. Imagine having First Contact with a quadrillion different alien species simultaneously. That is what we are looking at, with an uncontrolled hard takeoff Singularity. Just one First Contact would be the most significant event in human history, but transhumanists are talking about that times a billion, or a trillion, all at once.
In the comments, Sulfur referenced the "transhumanist mindset which says that upward change is a dogma". But there is a portion of transhumanists who resist that dogma. Take Nick Bostrom's "The Future of Human Evolution" paper, very popular among SIAI staff. I believe that Bostrom's 2004 publication of this paper was a ground-breaking moment for transhumanism, definitive of a schism that has been ongoing since. The schism is between those who see transhumanism as unqualifiedly good and those who see humanity's self-enhancement as a challenging project that demands close attention and care. Here's the abstract:
Evolutionary development is sometimes thought of as exhibiting an inexorable trend towards higher, more complex, and normatively worthwhile forms of life. This paper explores some dystopian scenarios where freewheeling evolutionary developments, while continuing to produce complex and intelligent forms of organization, lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being that we care about. We then consider how such catastrophic outcomes could be avoided and argue that under certain conditions the only possible remedy would be a globally coordinated policy to control human evolution by modifying the fitness function of future intelligent life forms.
I am strongly attracted to the Singularity Institute, Future of Humanity Institute, and Lifeboat Foundation, because I see these three organizations as the cautious side of transhumanism, exemplified by the concerns aired in the above paper. Many other iterations of transhumanism seem to be awkward fusions between SL2 transhumanism and the boilerplate leftist or rightist politics of the Baby Boomer generation. Though even our new President is attempting to engage in post-Boomer politics, the USA Boomer Politics War is so huge that it sucks in practically everything else. It's pathetic when transhumanists can't be intellectually strong enough to transcend that. Really, it is a generational war.
As somewhat of a side note, people misunderstand the SIAI position with respect to this question. SIAI seeks not to impose a superintelligent regime on the world, but rather asks, "given that we believe a hard takeoff is likely, what the heck can we do to preserve Human Value, or structures at least continuous with human value?" The question is not easy, and people often misinterpret the probability assessment of a fast transition as a desire for a fast transition. I would desire nothing more than a slow transition. I just don't think that the transition from Homo sapiens to recursive self-improvement will be very slow. Still, even if it's fast, value can probably be retained, if we allocate significant resources and attention to specifically doing so.
I believe that there can be a self-enhancement path that everyone can agree on as beneficial. I think there is enough room in the universe to hold diverse values, but not exponentially diverse in the information theory sense. I doubt that intelligent species throughout the multiverse retain their legacy forms as they spread across the cosmos. Inventing and mastering the technologies of self-modification is not optional for intelligent civilizations -- it's a must. The question is what we use them for, and whether we let society degenerate into a mess of a million of shattered fragments in the process.
The Power of Self-Replication
How can a small group of people have a big impact on the world? Develop a machine or service that is self-replicating or self-amplifying.
In a mundane way, artifacts such as iPhones and even shovels engage in human-catalyzed self-replication. People see them, then want them, then offer their money for them (or build them themselves, in a few cases), which provides the economic juice necessary to increase production and maintain the infrastructure necessary for that self-replication, like the Apple Store.
Self-replication can be relatively easy as long as the substrate is designed to contain components not much less complex than the finished product. For instance, the self-replicating robot built at Cornell self-replicates not from scratch, but rather from a set of pre-engineered blocks not much simpler than the robot itself. Using a hierarchy of such self-replicators, where each step is relatively simple but results in the creation of more complex components used in the next stage of self-replication, could provide a bootstrappable pathway to self-replicating infrastructures. Such a scheme also makes recycling easier -- if a large machine falls apart, perhaps only some of its components need by discarded, and the rest can be reused.
At the root of a substantial number of transhumanists' wild visions appears to be confidence that self-replicating factories will ultimately be produced. Otherwise, it is hard to imagine how society would acquire the necessary wealth to implement changes of the type that transhumanists discuss. In fact, it appears to me that modern transhumanism evolved in large part out of enthusiasm for the idea of molecular nanotechnology in the mid-1990s. The ongoing philosophical connection of transhumanism to other Enlightenment movements is more of a post hoc project designed to make transhumanism palatable and comprehensible to larger groups.
At its core, I believe that transhumanism's greatest accomplishment is identifying self-replicating and self-amplifying processes as humanity's greatest opportunity and hazard of the 21st century -- technology with the potential to allow us to transcend our material, physiological, and psychological limitations or, if handled poorly, cause a reprise of the Permian-Triassic extinction. You don't have to be a transhumanist to appreciate this insight; you only need to be convinced that self-replicating machines are technically plausible at some point in the near or mid-term future. Indeed, a substantial minority of tech-oriented people seem open to the possibility. Here is a poll from a 2005 CNN article on RepRap:
Even more exciting to me than self-replication is the power of self-amplification. I define self-amplification as a growing optimization process that extends its own infrastructure in a diverse way rather than simple self-replication, where "infrastructure" is defined as both core structures and the peripheral structures that support them. Humanity is an interesting edge case here, at the boundary of what I would consider the transition from self-replication to self-amplification. We are able to create diverse artifacts, but our ability to inject diversity into our own bodies and minds through self-transformation or directed evolution is extremely limited.
There is an opportunity here for the development of a mathematical model that quantifies the information and structural content produced by a given self-replicating or self-amplifying entity. Humans like to think that we exhibit nearly infinite variety in the creation of artifacts, but this is untrue. We mostly create artifacts that we have cultural and evolutionary predispositions to create. If we realized how constrained our information-producing tendencies are, it would help us become a more mature species through better self-reflection.
Good.is: Criticisms of the Singularity
Yesterday, Good posted the seventh and second-to-last installment of myself and Roko's series on the Singularity, "Criticisms of the Singularity". (My last contribution to the series, "The Benefits of a Successful Singularity", was promoted to the front page of Digg.) For your benefit, the complete article is reproduced here.
Part seven in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.
As was previously discussed in our series, the "singularity" means the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, or "superintelligence," a type of intelligence that is impressively more intelligent than humans. Possible methods for its creation include brain-computer interfaces and pure artificial intelligence, among others. Various scientists, futurists, and mathematicians that write about the singularity, such as Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, and Vernor Vinge, consider such an event plausible sometime between about 2025 and 2050. Among those who consider the singularity plausible, it is widely agreed that the event could alter the world, our civilization, and even our bodies and minds profoundly, through the technologies that superintelligence could create and deploy.
Because the singularity is such a new and speculative idea, and the subject of little academic study, there are people that take practically every imaginable position with respect to it. Some, unfamiliar and shocked by the idea, dismiss it outright or simply react with confusion. Others, such as philosopher Max More, dismiss some of the central propositions after more careful study. A substantial number embrace it openly and without too many qualifications, such as futurist Ray Kurzweil, who seems to expect a positive outcome with a very high probability. My organization, the Singularity Institute, and related thinkers such as philosopher Nick Bostrom, see a positive outcome as possible but not without very careful work towards ensuring that superintelligences retain human-friendly motivations as they grow in intelligence and power.
Criticisms of the singularity generally fall into two camps: feasibility critiques and desirability critiques. The most common feasibility critiques are what I call the Imago Dei objection and the Microsoft Windows objection. Imago Dei refers to Image of God, which is the doctrine that humans are created in God's image. If humans are really created in the image of God, then we must be sacred beings, and the idea of artificially creating a superior being becomes dubious-sounding. If such a superior being could be possible, then wouldn't God have created us that way to begin with? Unfortunately for this view, science, experimental psychology, and common sense have revealed that humans possess many intellectual shortcomings, and that some people have more of these shortcomings than others. Human intelligence isn't perfect as it is; long-term improvements may become possible with new technologies.
The Microsoft Windows objection often surfaces when the topic of superintelligent artificial intelligence is brought up and goes something like this: "How can you be expecting superintelligent robots in this century when programmers can't even create a decent operating system?" The simple answer is that too many cooks ruin a dish, and operating systems are plagued by a huge number of programmers without any coherent theory that they can really agree on. In other fields, such as optics, aerospace, and physics, scientists and engineers cooperate effectively on multi-million dollar projects because there are empirically supported theories that restrict many of the final product parameters. Artificial intelligence can reach the human level and beyond if it one day has such an organizing theory. At the present time, no such theory exists, though there are pieces that may fit into the puzzle.
Lastly, there are desirability critiques. I am very sympathetic to many of these. If we humans build a more intelligent species, might it replace us? It certainly could, and evolutionary and human history support this possibility strongly. Eventually creating superintelligence seems hard to avoid though. People want to be smarter, and to have smarter machines that do more work for us. Instead of trying to stave off the singularity forever, I think we ought to study it carefully and make purposeful moves in the right direction. If the first superintelligent beings can be constructed such that they retain their empathy for humanity, and wish to preserve that empathy in any future iterations of themselves, we could benefit massively. Poverty and even disease and aging could become things of the past. There is no cosmic force that compels more powerful beings to look down upon weaker beings—rather, this is an emotion that comes from being animals built by natural selection. In the context of much of natural selection it is evolutionarily advantageous to selectively oppress weaker beings, though some humans, such as vegans, have demonstrated that genuine altruism and compassion are possible.
In contrast to Darwinian beings, superintelligence could be engineered for empathy from the ground up. A singularity originating with enhanced human intelligences could select the most compassionate and selfless subjects for radical enhancement first. An advanced artificial intelligence could be built with a deep, stable sense of empathy and even lacking an observer-centered goal system. It would have no special desire to discard its empathy because it would lack the evolutionary programming that causes that desire to surface to begin with. The better you understand evolution and natural selection, the less likely you think it is for Darwinian dynamics to apply to superintelligence.
We should certainly hope that benevolent or human-friendly superintelligence is possible, or human extinction could be the result. Just look at what we're already doing to the animal kingdom. Yet, by thinking about the issues in advance, we may figure out how to tip the odds in our favor. Human-posthuman synergy and cooperation could become possible.
Michael Anissimov is a futurist and evangelist for friendly artificial intelligence. He writes a Technorati Top 100 Science blog, Accelerating Future. Michael currently serves as Media Director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) and is a co-organizer of the annual Singularity Summit.
PEA Soup: The Ethics of Santa
From PEA Soup, a blog devoted to policy, ethics, and academia:
Many people teach their small children the myth of Santa Claus: that a magical being who lives at the North Pole brings presents on Christmas Eve. Secondary aspects of the myth are that whether one receives presents is a function of one’s behavior, and that you can communicate with Santa about your preferences. Not only parents, but retail establishments and (I have recently discovered) public schools collude in perpetuating this myth among children of a certain age.
Perpetuating the Santa myth has at least these moral reasons against it:
1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.It seems to me that these reasons are sufficient to show that perpetuating the Santa myth is immoral. Most of America strongly disagrees with me on this point. I would be interested to know what the professionals at PEA Soup think.
Lying to children about Santa is just one of the many ways in which parents feel no compunctions about manipulating their children rather than treating them as persons. The only "good" thing about this manipulation is that it is supposedly for the benefit of the child, though that is debatable. One problem with the Santa myth not mentioned above is that the associated manipulation and lies is indicative of a broader pattern of manipulation and lies.
Complexity Metric Blog on Jaron Lanier vs. Eliezer Yudkowsky
Here is the commentary. Most of all, I enjoy reviews and comments by outsiders with no contact with our current community. Here are a few quotes and my comments:
It is video conference phone call split screen debate between this Yudkowsky guy who is the head scientist at the Singularity Institute, and Lanier who has been the genius hippy in red dread locks since his early pioneering work with Virtual Reality and artificial vision systems.
Before you click the link, let me frame the debate.
These two guys represent the two extremes of a subtle range of viewpoints on evolution, AI, and human consciousness.
An interesting and subtle range that deserves more popular and academic attention and will get it sooner or later because we are building technologies that produce divisive responses to the relevant philosophical issues.
Jaron's main criticism of the hard AI camp in this debate is that their strong attachment to finding a way past death and their apriori beliefe in the posibility of resonably building self evolving intelegence together become so rhetorically invasive that they can no longer do objective investigation or engineering... that their beliefs and desires make them "religious".
Well, Jaron would probably prefer if we didn't do any objective investigation or engineering, but that's not true. Remember, as cybernetic totalists, we are totally devoted to our goal. Totally awesome!
From my perspective, Jaron is a nothing more than a (very bright) priest who can't stop doing science in the basement, and Yudkoswsky is nothing less than a scientist that can't help wanting to build a God.
Hah! A superintelligence would be like a god. I can vaguely understand why people who don't regard MNT as plausible would disagree with this, but I never understand why those who do believe that MNT is plausible would.
The fireworks in the video begin at 11:00! I actually agree with many of Jaron's points in the abstract. I disagree with him when he says that we cannot represent some physical systems in totality or simulate them precisely.
Hanson: Philosophy Kills
Robin Hanson found a skeptical Bryan Caplan when the former explained his positions on cryonics to the latter. ("The more I furrowed my brow, the more earnestly he spoke.") Caplan said:
What disturbed me was when I realized how low he set his threshold for [cryonics] success. Robin didn’t care about biological survival. He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body. He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself†into a computer. To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to prove that “uploading yourself†isn’t life extension. “An upload is merely a simulation. It wouldn’t be you,†I remarked. …
“Suppose we uploaded you while you were still alive. Are you saying that if someone blew your biological head off with a shotgun, you’d still be alive?!†Robin didn’t even blink: “I’d say that I just got smaller.†… I’d like to think that Robin’s an outlier among cryonics advocates, but in my experience, he’s perfectly typical. Fascination with technology crowds out not just philosophy of mind, but common sense.
Hanson responded with an articulate explanation of causal functionalism and the illusory quality of the mind/matter distinction:
Bryan, you are the sum of your parts and their relations. We know where you are and what you are made of; you are in your head, and you are made out of the signals that your brain cells send each other. Humans evolved to think differently about minds versus other stuff, and while that is a useful category of thought, really we can see that minds are made out of the same parts, just arranged differently. Yes, you “feel,†but that just tells you that stuff feels, it doesn’t say you are made of anything besides the stuff you see around and inside you.
Although the argument may seem to be about cryonics on the surface, it is really about the viability of uploading.
Greg Fish: Against Causal Functionalism
Greg Fish, a science writer with a popular blog who contributes to places like Business Week and Discovery News, has lately been advancing a Searleian criticism of causal functionalism. For instance, here and here. Here is an excerpt from the latter:
A Computer Brain is Still Just Code
In the future, if we model an entire brain in real time on the level of every neuron, every signal, and every burst of the neurotransmitter, we’ll just end up with a very complex visualization controlled by a complex set of routines and subroutines.
These models could help neurosurgeons by mimicking what would happen during novel brain surgery, or provide ideas for neuroscientists, but they’re not going to become alive or self aware since as far as a computer is concerned, they live as millions of lines of code based on a multitude of formulas and rules. The real chemistry that makes our brains work will be locked in our heads, far away from the circuitry trying to reproduce its results.
Now, if we built a new generation of computers using organic components, the simulations we could run could have some very interesting results.
On his blog, he says:
The actual chemical reactions that decide on an action or think through a problem don’t take place and the biological wiring that’s the crucial part of how the whole process takes place isn’t there, just a statistical approximation of it.
This is just another version of vitalism. Computers lack the "vital spark" necessary to create the "soul", even if they implement the functions of intelligence and self-reflection even more effectively than the biological entity that inspired their creation. But those functions are what create intelligence and self-reflection, not magic chemistry-that-can-never-ever-be-simulated-even-in-principle.
There is quite a bit of fuzziness in chemical reactions themselves, and not all this fuzziness is necessary to implement intelligence or "self-awareness".
Say we have a molecular dynamics simulation of the brain in complete and utter detail. It behaves exactly the same as the intelligence that it is "simulating". You can say "it's just a simulation", but it can achieve all the same things that the original can, including be your friend or even possibly kill you. In such circumstances, "it's just a simulation" is quite pointless hairsplitting. Certainly, some atomic configurations are conscious and others are not, but there is no vital force that biological molecules possess that high-resolution simulations of those biological molecules would not also possess.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's still possible that it's not a duck, but if it has a perfect emulation of a duck brain and can walk around in a duck body, then it may as well be a duck.