ABSTRACT
In this paper, the goal is to inspect the possible philosophical implications of a mind modeled as a machine. It is important to first look at the possible models of the machines. I achieve this by first looking at the early history of the field of Artificial Intelligence, looking at discrepancies between mind and machines. I then proceed to explain the need for such a philosophy, immediately followed by a look at the philosophical repercussions in the domains of free will in simulated minds and ethics in the case of both simulated and emulated brains. By the end of the paper, we should have a concise idea of what a simulated mind should entail.
I. Introduction
II. The Mind Modeled As A Machine
a. Early History
b. Modeling The Mind
III. Philosophical Implications
a. The need for a Philosophical Basis
b. Free Will and Deterministic Machines
c. Ethical Implications of Emulations and Simulations
IV. Conclusion
I. Introduction
Ever since we have discovered the power of computational machines, we have imagined the possibilities of using this power to leverage the human mind. In a short span of time, this technology has been ingrained so deeply into our everyday life that it would be virtually unthinkable to get rid of it today. To have access to events, to people, to information from all over the world in a single second has become second nature to even the most amateur of technophiles. It is a world of possibilities where we use the information available to us as an extension of our own minds. What happens when we try to emulate our minds inside the machines? What happens when we let go of our own organic bodies and let our mind reside inside our own creation? There are many possibilities, and all of them are exciting. I will first cover in this paper the steps taken to show the distinctions and relatedness between mind and machine, mainly the history of the field of Artificial Intelligence and some theories as to how it could be implemented. I will then cover the philosophical implications of such a technology, such as free will, and the ethical implications of virtualizations.
II. The Mind Modeled as a Machine
a. Early History
As soon as the idea of the first computer emerged, men came about and noticed the possibilities. One man stood out from the pack by extrapolating from this idea. Alan Turing (1912 – 1954), a British mathematician, thought about a special kind of machine, which he called a universal machine. This fictional machine would have the capability of taking any instruction from 'an instruction table' (remember, this was before they even made computers. The concept of programming was barely in its cradle.) and use it himself to output his data, no matter what the instruction table is. He then went further ahead and developed the idea that given enough space and time, we could even reproduce the 'instruction table' of the human mind inside of the universal machine in such a way that the output of this machine would be indistinguishable from a typical human mind.
Turing used the idea of his universal machine to devise a test in which it would be possible to tell whether a machine had achieved a human-level of consciousness. The Turing Test is relatively simple. If a machine can deceive a human into thinking that it is human by talking to him through a teleprompter (or any kind of non-physical conversation), he can be said to possess human-level consciousness. There are many who oppose the test, but the main argument behind the test is given by Turing himself,
"According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe 'A thinks but B does not' whilst B believes 'B thinks but A does not'. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks." (1936)
From this point on, the idea that the mind could be seen as a complex machine started out. With the development of computational power and complexity, we have arrived at a point where machines themselves are helping us to figure out what it means to be human, with their immense help in the fields of Medicine, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. We are only now starting to understand how our own bodies are built and how we can build on these lessons to provide a better future for ourselves.
b. Modeling the Mind
In order to create a virtual mind, we are presented with two choices. We can either emulate or simulate the pattern of connections located inside the brain which give rise to our consciousness.
In emulation, the goal is to recreate the exact patterns of the brain, so that the same reactions occur in the same places. We are in effect trying to recreate a 1 to 1 scale of the human brain, to a precise enough resolution so as to also give rise to consciousness. We will always expect for there to be noise or other kinds of interference, but an emulation assumes that the brain that we are emulating would react in the same manner were it be affected by those same interferences.
In order to emulate the brain, the method that most people would accept as the most simple and most accessible would be to scan an existing brain and recreate it virtually. Such scans are almost within reach, using Magnetic Resonance Imaging at a somewhat higher resolution. We would also need enough computing power to emulate the entire brain, which we do not possess at this moment. Such a process was looked into with a little bit more detail by Goertzel and Bugaj in their book 'The Path to Posthumanism'.
"There are thought to be around 1010 neurons in the brain, and 1033-1015 synapses connecting them. According to this, if
In the case of simulation, our goal would be to create the algorithms portrayed by the brain patterns, so that the overall effects remain the same. For example, if we were trying to simulate the optical area of the brain, we would not need to simulate a retina attached to optic nerves; we could simply attach a camera and transform the resulting data into a format accepted by these optic nerves. The camera would effectively simulate an eye. In order to recreate an intelligent mind, it might not be necessary to recreate the entire human brain. The human brain takes care of many more things than simply the mind or its intelligence. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing, has delved on the origin of human intelligence in his book 'On Intelligence'. He advances the idea that what is needed to create an intelligent being like a human is a neocortex, the thin, outer layer of our brain. Of course, the rest of the brain is needed to support this neocortex, but when we learn the algorithms behind the model, we can learn how to build one without the need for the biological support. After all, in a virtual environment, there is no reason for the created mind to obey the same constraining laws we have in our own mortal state.
Jeff Hawkins sets up the neocortex as a system of biofeedback in which neurons receive input from sensory organs and are able to "call back" those inputs in a series of hierarchal ordered layers which we perceive as our imagination and thought. This gives rise to self-reflection and a self-reliant process of possible reorganization of these layers. In order to reproduce this effect, we would not need to recreate the thirty billion cells of our neocortex and their interactions. We could simply recreate the hierarchical system that the neocortex implements.
It may not be possible at this stage to know when and how the simulation of our brains will be possible, but it seems to definitely be on our horizon. With these capabilities comes a re-affirmation of what it means to be human, and what it means to be intelligent.
III. Philosophical Implications
a. The need for a Philosophical basis
Were I to create a virtual brain inside my computer, where this virtual brain residing in a virtual body would observe virtual objects located inside a virtual world, would this virtual person have the same “amount of reality” as a person standing in front of the box observing it? The virtual person would probably believe that the reality it perceives is, to all intents and purposes, the "real" reality. We perceive here the opposite of the "Matrix effect" in which it is not the "upper" reality that is considered more real, they are both equally real, but relative to the observer. Now, what if the virtual brain inside the computer was actually my own uploaded brain? Would it receive humane treatment because it has human memories? A lot of new questions as to the epistemological basis for reality are raised. That is why a need for a philosophy based on the mind modeled as a machine is imperative if we are to break into this new age of intelligence enhancement. It is not the purpose of this paper to dig deeper into the subject, it is simply to raise consciousness to possible contradictions within the more classical philosophical trends.
b. Free Will and Deterministic Machines
Up until now, we have only created machines that are deterministic in essence, meaning that for the exact same input, the machine will output exactly the same result. Some people have taken this view and rejected the idea of the mind modeled as a machine because we are believed to possess free will. I will attempt to show in this section that this need not be the case, the virtualization of a mind does not necessarily render it deterministic.
In the first place, we can always resort to the compatibilism theory, supported by philosophers like Hume and Hobbes. Hobbes states that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive. He does so by redefining free will: "Free will is the unencumbered ability of an agent to do what she wants" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007). A person might decide to do something out of his volition, without being pressed into it by an exterior agent. In the case where, say, a man puts a gun on the agent's head to perform an action, that would be a clear case of lack of free will. But in the case where the agent says "I can, but I won't", that would be considered free will in Hobbes's definition. We can see from this definition that any machine can be said to have free will, even basic machinery that do not try to imitate the human mind. But that is not the solution that we are looking for, since we are trying to show that the free will that pertains to the human mind, and not to simple machines, still exists when virtualized into a machine.
In order to do that, we'll have to go back to Alan Turing. He was extremely interested in the burgeoning field of quantum mechanics. in 1951, Turing was a guest on BBC Talk where he invoked the idea that a Turing Machine’s output should in principle be predicted by calculation, but a way around the limitation could be found using quantum mechanics, as related by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
"Turing [, on the BBC Talk show,] is discussing the possibility that, when seen as a quantum-mechanical machine rather than a classical machine, the Turing machine model is inadequate. The correct connection to draw is not with Turing's 1938 work on ordinal logics, but with his knowledge of quantum mechanics from Eddington and von Neumann in his youth. Indeed, in an early speculation, influenced by Eddington, Turing had suggested that quantum mechanical physics could yield the basis of free-will (Hodges 1983, p. 63). Von Neumann's axioms of quantum mechanics involve two processes: unitary evolution of the wave function, which is predictable, and the measurement or reduction operation, which introduces unpredictability. Turing's reference to unpredictability must therefore refer to the reduction process."
It is entirely possible that our own minds behave in a quantum fashion, which gives rise to some aspect of our consciousness, granting us our free will. Were we to replicate these quantum phenomena in our simulations, we would keep the same amount of free will as we do in our biological bodies (as it is always possible that we do not possess free will in the first place). While the evidence is not absolutely conclusive, it is definitely worth a second glance from perpetrators of the strong deterministic point of view.
c. Ethical Implications of Simulations
In
Goertzel and Bugaj relate a conversation between the Dalai Lama and systems theorist Francisco Varela (and two of his colleagues,
Hayward: Does Your Holiness regard it as a definite criterion that there must be continuity with some prior consciousness that whenever there is a cognition, there must have been a stream of cognition going back to beginningless time?
Dalai Lama: There is no possibility for a new cognition, which has no relationship to a previous continuum, to arise at all. I can't totally rule out the possibility that, if all the external conditions and the karmic action were there, a stream of consciousness might actually enter into a computer.
Dalai Lama: Yes, that's right. [Dalai Lama laughs] There is a possibility that a scientist who is very much involved his whole life [with computers], then the next life... [would be reborn in a computer], same process! [Laughter] Then this machine which is half-human and half-machine has been reincarnated. (p. 223)
I will not debate the point further, as the actual detailed points should be dealt with when there is a clearer view in what an 'emulated brain' actually results. We have opened our minds to the issues involved and we will be able to look at the upcoming events with better judgement.
IV. Conclusion
After looking at the model of the mind as a machine and the history of its theory, we were able to discern some elements that brought forth some interesting philosophical implications. We understood that it was important to have a philosophical basis for the newly acquired sense of self-identity, we have looked into how an emulated brain would affect our free will and we finally looked into how we should proceed once we have built the emulating machines. From this point on, since an emulated brain would only get faster and more powerful, we should look at the possible repercussions of advanced artificial intelligence (or human-cyborg hybridized intelligence). Mainly, we need to take a look at the possible motives and emergence speed of such intelligence.
Works Cited List
1. Goertzel, Ben and Bugaj, Stephan Vladimir. The Path to Posthumanism. Academica Press,LLC, 2006.
2. Hawkins, Jeff. On Intelligence. Owl Books, 2005.
3. “Turing, Alan” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online. 2007. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/
4. Turing, Alan. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 1936 (Manifesto)
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