Worshipping the Machineby
Dmitry Chernikov
Are
We Spiritual Machines? Everything dies, except taxes and dreams of immortality. Some obviously impractical and idealistic fellows decide to do something against the former. Ray Kurzweil, who on the contrary adopts a very "can-do" attitude, puts a new twist on the immortality problem. He believes that very soon, perhaps within our lifetimes, we can advance from "better living through chemistry" to "immortality through computer technology." In this book his vision undergoes a sophisticated critique by several scholars which include biologists, philosophers, and theologians. Kurzweil's reply to each critique is included. Fancy Free The desire to return to the Garden of Eden is as old as the Fall. Unfortunately, the angel with a flaming sword refuses to let us in. It is here that Kurzweil's genius becomes manifest. He has found a way to deceive the angel. Surely, Kurzweil reasons, it is programmed to protect the Garden from men. But what if we were no longer men? Could we perchance sneak in disguised as tractors and coffeemakers? Imagine the possibilities. No longer will the excuse that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak be available to us. These puny bodies made out of meat will be as nothing compared to steel and silicon. At first perhaps we will be lining up to replace our primitive bodily organs with mighty titanium implants. Later on we will be uploading our very minds into computers. Questions such as whether or not androids do, in fact, dream of electric sheep suddenly become interesting. Will there be division of labor among the machines? Could one upload one's consciousness into a garbage truck, an airplane, or a Terminator? Could one truly come back as a 38 double-D bra? Will my appliances come to life and demand "civil rights"? (I picture a scene where a human is selling an air conditioner on the street. When a passer-by asks him how much it costs, the air conditioner barks: "You idiot! I am selling him!") One also wonders how the machines will actually "do it." It certainly would be worth finding out. What about love and virtue and redemption? Here is another crucial Kurzweil's innovation. Not for him are visions of unfeeling robots trying vainly to understand humanity. In his imagination machines will have feelings that are even more intense than our own. (One would hope that these feelings will be accompanied by the machine equivalent of intense self-control.) Virtue, shmirtue, how boring. Kurzweil has completed the search for the perfect man. Jesus Christ, meet Mr. Toaster Oven. The Argument Since the entire book is online, and the arguments on both sides are crisp and straightforward, I will briefly summarize what I understand to be Kurzweil's position. Kurzweil believes that 1. Human beings are reducible to matter which exhibits self-organizing principles. Thus consciousness can be created by putting together a sufficient number of neuron-like nodes. Once technology allows us to connect a few billion nodes together, he does not doubt that this collection will become conscious. We may not know precisely how the emergence of consciousness will occur, but rest assured that it will. 2. We humans are (or, at the very least, Kurzweil is) smart enough to duplicate the attributes of life and intelligence in our own creations. Man vs. Machine Very well, what exactly are those attributes? What is the difference between a human being and a machine, if any? It seems to me that at least part of the answer lies in the fact that life is "quadriform," while a machine is not. It follows that life should possess the following attributes: 1. Every creature exists in some sense for itself. Its purpose is its own life and happiness. Happiness for a human being may consist in one thing, whereas happiness for, say, a tiger or amoeba may be something else entirely. Nonetheless, any lifeform will be eager to avoid pain and death and strive towards its last end for its own sake, whether instinctively or purposively. A machine, on the other hand, has no purpose other than to serve man by performing a useful function. Its "goals" do not differ from those of its creator. It has no internal life or experiences that are inaccessible to anyone but itself. How then does Kurzweil intend to imbue his creation with the ability to live for itself? How will he ascribe an enduring personal identity to it? (Synchronic identity refers to what at any given time makes x the object it is and distinguishes it from other objects. Diachronic identity deals with what makes x at time t identical to y at an earlier or later time. Both are at issue here.) What justifies his faith in the magic of self-organization? It is certainly true that irreducible emergent properties are a real phenomenon: for instance, the price system is an emergent property of the market. But in the case of the market we can identify the source from which the property emerges, viz. the recognition by the individual members of society of the benefits of social cooperation and division of labor, and can even trace its evolution from a tiny two or three-person market to one in which social cooperation has become worldwide. But by what means is consciousness supposed to emerge from a billion transistors tied together with wires? What kind of consciousness will it be, and how will we recognize it? 2. Man, as we know, is an acting agent. He does not merely react to external stimuli; he takes initiative and acts with the purpose of changing the world according to his design. Similarly, no lifeform, not even the most primitive one, is entirely at the mercy of its environment. It, too, acts on instinct, as if propelled by a powerful force to use the natural resources to sustain its life and pursue contentment. The components of a machine, however, are deterministic and passive black boxes that react to certain inputs by transforming them into outputs. Has Kurzweil devised the technology that will permit the components of his machine to find "food" and convert it into energy, to procreate, to regenerate themselves, to help their fellows in need, and so on and so forth, to be, in other words, miniature productive factories, that is, at least partially, to be self-sufficient and inner-directed actors that will perform the enormous variety of functions (and even have the ability to develop new functions) that will keep his machine working and growing and evolving into something interesting? 3. The interaction of the "components" of an organism sustains the life and "happiness" of each component. Thus the various organelles of a cell function not only without intruding upon each other but in such a way that they are absolutely indispensable for each other's existence. We may therefore ask Kurzweil how he plans to ensure that his machine, tremendously complex and ever-changing as it must be, will function harmoniously and will not fall apart at the first opportunity. In other words, how will his system be coordinated? How will Kurzweil's transistors escape the fate of, for example, a purely socialist society, whose economy must inevitably disintegrate into autarchic and hostile households? In fact, no cell organelle or any bodily organ can survive on its own outside the system of which they are a part, at least not for long. What is gained by such tight interdependency is efficiency and organism integrity. The components "cling to" each other for dear life. The prospect of dissolution or separation from the whole spells disaster and impels the components by one means or another to stick together and cooperate as well as they can. The components of no machine of which I am aware have this sort of dependency and integrity. Disassemble a computer or an automobile, and each part will be just as functional as it was before. To put the matter bluntly, unlike the parts of biological creatures, the components of a machine are indifferent to each other's and the machine's well-being. How does Kurzweil intend to infuse "charity" into his creation, let alone life? He should remember that zapping his technological terror with a lot of electricity is a poor substitute for the Holy Ghost, and Kurzweil's blithe assertion that "quantum effects" may help to animate a machine suggests that he may have had difficulty following Richard Feynman's QED. I am baffled by his eagerness to connect the theory that explains the interaction of light and electrons with whatever the soul actually is. 4. What will be the constraints on the possible actions of Kurzweil's machines? Will there be things that its programming will prohibit it from doing? What are those things? Human beings possess considerable freedom to act however they want, but there are numerous actions that, though possible to perform, are nonetheless forbidden (either by law or morally or by prudence). Kurzweil's engineers will have to code in a vast array of rules that will govern how his "spiritual machine" will act in any given situation. I submit that to simulate human laws in all their variety is an impossible task. A Word of Caution I should note in passing that even if "scientific immortality" is possible, it is not true immortality. The universe will not exist forever, and it is probably not in man's power to save it from destruction. Though he may live a billion years, he will still perish, and at that moment, a billion years will seem as fleeting (or as long) as a single second. Still More Trouble Suppose now for the sake of argument that Kurzweil was able to create a machine copy of a human. In order for this copy to be a continuation of me rather than a new entity, I must experience myself being "poured into" the machine wherein I leave my body (which I imagine collapsing on the floor dead) and join comfortably the Kurzweil’s computer. Has Kurzweil any idea as to how this process is to be implemented? With all due respect to our inventor, it seems more than a little silly to me. Second, if there is a dualism of the mind and body, such that though there is an intimate psychosomatic unity between them, nonetheless, the soul can exist without the body, while the body cannot exist without the soul, is Kurzweil’s project doomed from the start? Machines seem to be unsuitable hosts for a soul or mind, which, it is arguable, cannot be reduced to complexity and computation. Hence if dualism is true, then I see no way for Kurzweil to make his machine with the properties of a human being. Conclusion It would appear that organic systems are not merely vastly complex but are ultimately incomprehensible. There is a parallel between them and the economy, as Mises writes:
A fortiori, any system that rivals the market in complexity (insofar as such things can be measured), such as a human being, are similarly beyond the abilities of the individual mind to grasp fully. Thus these systems seem to represent a clear limit on human achievement, because the principles that cannot be discerned cannot be used.
April 4, 2006 Dmitry Chernikov [send him mail] is a graduate student in philosophy at Kent State University. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com |
Although
I doubt that Kurzweil will succeed, it is likely that in the process
he will gain a great deal of useful knowledge. Furthermore, the
man is without doubt a genius and may therefore be entitled to certain
eccentricities. Let him try to do what the doubting world considers
to be impossible. I wish him every success.