I make a point of always trying to listed on the EconTalk podcast each week — a venue in which George Mason University economics professor Russ Roberts conducts a roughly hour-long interview with an author or academic about some topic related to economics. A couple weeks ago, the guest was Robin Hanson, also an economics professor at GMU, who was talking about the “technological singularity” which could result from perfecting the technique of “porting” copies of humans into computers. Usually the topic is much more down-to-earth, but these kinds of speculations can be interesting to play with, and there were a couple of things which really struck me listening to the interview with Hanson, which ran to some 90 minutes.
Hanson’s basic contention is that the next big technological leap that will change the face of the world economy will be the ability to create a working copy of a human by “porting” that person’s brain into a computer. He argues that this could come much sooner than the ability to create an “artificial intelligence” from scratch, because it doesn’t require knowing how intelligence works — you simply create an emulation program on a really powerful computer, and then do a scan of the brain which picks up the current state of every part of it and how those parts interact. (There’s a wikipedia article on the concept, called “whole brain emulation” here.) Hanson thinks this would create an effectively unlimited supply of what are, functionally, human beings, though they may look like computer programs or robots, and that this would fundamentally change the economy by creating an effectively infinite supply of labor.
Let’s leave all that aside for a moment, because what fascinates me here is something which Roberts, a practicing Jew, homed in on right away: Why should we believe that the sum and total of what you can physically scan in the brain is all there is to know about a person? Why shouldn’t we think that there’s something else to the “mind” than just the parts of the brain and their current state? Couldn’t there be some kind of will which is not materially detectable and is what is causing the brain to act the way it is?
(Or to use the cyber-punk terminology which seems more appropriate with this topic: How do we know there’s not a ghost in the machine?)
Hanson’s answer is as follows (this section starts around minute 32 of the podcast):
“I have a physics background, and by the time that you’re done with physics that should be well knocked into you, that, you know, certainly most top scientists, if you ask them a survey question will say, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ There really isn’t room for much else. Sorry. It’s not like it’s an open question here. Physics has a pretty complete picture of what’s in the world around us. We’ve probed every nook and cranny, and we only ever keep finding the same damn stuff.
We have enormous progress on seeing the stuff our world is made of. Almost everything around you is the same atoms, the same protons, electrons, the rare neutrino that flies around. And that’s pretty much it. You have to get pretty far off to see some of the strange materials and things that physicists sometimes probe. Physicists have to make these enormous machines and create these very alien environments in order to find new stuff to study because they’ve so well studied the material around us. The things our world is made out of are really, really well established. How it combines together in interesting ways gets complicated and then we don’t get it, but the stuff that it’s made out of, we get.
Your head is made out of chemicals. We’ve never seen anything else. It’s always theoretically possible that when something’s really complicated and you don’t know how to predict the complexity from the parts, you could say, ‘Well therefore, it could be this whole is different from the parts, because it’s too difficult to predict.’
…
We should separate two very different issues here. One is technological understanding and knowing how things work and how to make things, and the other is knowing what the world is made of. So, I make this very strong and confident claim: We know what the world is made of, and we know what pieces they are and how they interact at a fine grain. But at higher levels of organization, we don’t know how to make other things like, even, photosynthesis in cells. We don’t know how to make a photosynthesis machine. You could take your cell phone out of your pocket and take it apart and you wouldn’t know how to make a phone like that…. We don’t know how it works, but we’re pretty sure what it’s made out of.”
Now, this line of thinking seems fairly familiar to me from talking with materialist/atheists of a scientific bent: We have all these great scientific tools, and all they’ve ever detected is matter and energy, never a “will” or a “beautiful” or a “soul”, and so therefore it’s pretty clear that when we talk about our minds we’re really talking about our brains and there just isn’t anything there except chemicals and electricity.
However, it seems to me that this presents a rather obvious blind spot. We, as human persons, experience all sorts of things which would seem to be evidence of having a will which decides things in a non-deterministic fashion. We also respond to ideas such as “beautiful” or “justice” or “good” in ways that would suggest that there is something there that we’re talking about.
When we say, “Physicists have done all this work, and all they’ve ever found is matter and energy,” you are really saying, “Given the tools and methodology physicists use, all they are able to detect is matter and energy.” But I’m not clear how getting from that to, “Therefore there is nothing other than matter and energy,” is anything other than an assumption.
Is there any valid reason why we should accept the jump from, “Tools that scientists use to detect things can only detect the existence of material things,” to “Only material things exist”?
This seems particularly troublesome given that the project here is supposedly to create an emulation program which can be given a brain scan and then act like an independent human. If our experience of being human is that there is something in the driver seat, something which decides what is beautiful or what is right or who to marry or whether we want rice pudding for lunch today, then unless there is some active, non-deterministic thing within the brain which can be measured by this scan, then what you get is going to be, for lack of a better word, dead.
This is like saying, “I’ve examined books with the most powerful microscopes and chemical detection kits, and I can’t detect anything except ink and paper. Therefore books do not refer to anything else and do not contain any ‘meaning’ — it’s all just ink and paper.”
The atheist would respond by saying:
1. Our non-deterministic mind may be like a computer’s random number generator. In certain situations, or perhaps constantly, our brains pick random paths and this can be emulated by a computer though obviously the computer would end up picking different paths.
2. Things like appreciation for beauty and justice are hardwired.
3. It’s illogical to believe in something that has no proof of being or at the very least it’s reasonable not to believe in something that has no proof of being.
SB,
Well, I think it’s a bit different, in that a book is a static record of information, while a human brain clearly has a lot going on in it — it’s just unclear to me a that the measurable activity includes the actual cause of the activity. But I’m having trouble coming up with another analogy. Perhaps trying to replicate a car and expecting it to drive itself around while neglecting to account for the existence of a driver?
RR,
Oh, and believe me, I’ve encountered those in conversations. However:
1. The random explanation does not seem to explain the actual experience. My experience of why I married my wife rather that someone else seems neither deterministic nor random, it seems chosen.
2. If so, there’s no particular reason we should adhere to them, and yet most people do not think that. (Actually, more frequently, I’m told that justice and beauty are evolutionary adaptations for efficiency and can be arrived at through game theory, but again I don’t think that fits with our experience.)
3. My whole beef with this line of thinking is that we do have evidence for the existence of the will — the evidence of experience. But in this line of thinking we completely dispense with that experience of being an I who decides things and instead assume that we’re not, simply because the particular set of tools we are using isn’t able to come up with a measurable thing which correllates to our experience. Now, I can accept it if someone is willing to explicitly say that he’s making a dogmatic choice to believe in the existence only of what is physically measurable, but I’m unclear why that should be considered an obvious or even necessarily rational choice.
They’re still better off trying to make artificial intelligence because it will be the will and intellect of man essentially presupposing decision questions and programming in the appropriate answers. If they ported the brain of a man into a computer, the computer would fail miserably, but would have the benefit of proving the effect of the will.
Here’s what would happen, a robot run on a ported human brain would not have the will to help keep it in check. Let’s say the robot is set off to engineer a hybrid melon that is larger, sweeter, and juicier. The robot will start comparing known melon varieties and then naturally, because it has the mind of a man, start thinking of boobs. There will be no will to consider social norms or inter-human consequences and then divert the attention to the task at hand. The robot will then head off to grope the nearest woman and won’t stop until someone pulls the plug.
Doubt it? Then address how a harmless discussion about artificial intelligence led to mentioning boobs?
🙂
So in all those Star Trek episodes where Kirk had to make an evil super-computer blow up by telling it something like, “Everything I tell you is a lie,” the easier approach would have been to send Uhura into flash the computer?
“…the easier approach would have been to send Uhura into flash the computer?”
Gives a new meaning to flash drive.
I think a computer with a ported human brain would still have a self-preservation instinct.
The funny thing is, I already know what would happen when the copy failed; it would be decided that the computer wasn’t set up right, or didn’t account for interactions properly, or other hardware failure.
Failure is always a hardware problem, not a theory problem.
How’s this for an analogy: you walk down a beach with a metal detector. You find nothing but metal. You conclude that there’s nothing buried in the sand but metal, and since you’ve swept it already, there’s nothing left buried in the sand.
If it was possible, then the real question is will this human-computer hybrid have the same mental defects that humans do? If so, what will an interconnected, pervasive, system-wide binary intelligence with feelings of envy, greed, lust and pride do?
Will it be SkyNet, or will it be the Borg?
Either way, nothing good can come from it. One has to wonder why Bill Gates has been hiring biologists at an alarming rate? What is he really up to? With his intellectual inheritance of population control and eugenics – it could go either way – wipe people out, or assimilate them. Hmm . . . it is much more pleasant to think about a different kind of boob than Bill Gates.
AK – You raise a good point: why would anyone want to recreate the human brain, if not for its will? To a materialist, the human brain is only a thinking machine, and a screwy one at that. So why enshrine it? Why limit a computer to the confines of human thought?
Initially I thought that speeding up the computerized brain would be a benefit but trying to make it do things that the biological brain wouldn’t, might drive it crazy.
Pinky,
If you are a materialist, then you necessarily live in fear of being wiped out of existence as if you never existed in the first place, since material existence is all that there is. Liberated from the oppressive commandments of an imaginary god, all ten of those pesky thou shat nots, then you are free to do all that is within your evolutionary impulses and technological know-how.
What could be better than ‘living’ on forever, so you can become god, yourself? Since your thoughts and superiority are naturally selected by chance, then you MUST exercise this superior power, before another intelligent monkey figures it out and uses it against you.
This brain download thingy will make the one who controls it, the god of the machine that is our paltry meaningless existence. Boy, I wish I’d spent more time studying computer science, now I’ll never get to be god.
Darwin — in either case, the question is whether the material, directly observable object is all there is, or whether there could be something beyond that.