Sometimes people make an argument along the lines of: “Science has discovered that human intelligence is intrinsically embodied, and therefore 1) you can’t just program an artificial intelligence in a box without a body, and 2) you can’t upload your mind because then it would no longer be embodied”. Usually they insert the word “profound” somewhere.
Let’s start by dealing with 1). First off, just because human intelligence is embodied, do we know that embodiment is a requirement for intelligence? Our bodies and their interaction with their environment happened to be around for evolution to work with in programming our minds, so just the fact that it used them isn’t very informative. To show that embodiment is necessary, you’d have to show that other approaches fail.
Second, I could see embodiment meaning a few different things, and none of them seem very threatening.
- “To make an intelligent mind you need to give it an actual physical body in the actual physical world.” This seems clearly false. If a virtual body in a virtual world has the same structure, it should allow the same intelligence, because intelligence is a structural property. (Something that’s wet in a virtual world with the same structure as the real world is not also wet in the real world, but something that’s intelligent in a virtual world with the same structure as the real world is also intelligent in the real world.)
- “To make an intelligent mind you need to give it something with body-structure in something with world-structure.” I doubt it. (Note, though, that I know nothing.) Anyway, this is compatible with AI-in-a-virtual-world-in-a-box.
- “To make an intelligent mind you need to give it some of the mental features that embodied creatures have, like sensory and motor modalities.” Maybe. Here there’s no conflict with bodiless-AI-in-a-box at all.
Next, the argument from embodiment against uploading. That one sounds confused to me too. If you uploaded my mind somewhere without connecting it to something with a structure much like my body in a sensible 3D world, then my mental life would be so much changed that you could indeed doubt whether I’d still be me. But if you uploaded my mind so that it stayed connected to something with a structure much like my body in a sensible 3D world, the only thing that’s changed — other than the details of the surroundings, which change every time I walk into a different room — is that things that used to be real are now virtual. (I need a better word for “real” here — I think virtual worlds are perfectly real in the philosophical sense.) This is not a difference that leaves me less embodied in any way that affects my psychology. A thing that used to be true of me — “I am being implemented in base-level reality” — is then no longer true of me, but this in itself causes no philosophical problems. Facts about me — where I am, what I perceive, what atoms I’m made of — change all the time. It’s only when my psychology is rewritten or my memories are changed that I need worry about being hurled into an existential crisis.
