Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, have published an in-depth roadmap for “whole brain emulation” – in other words, the replication of a fully functional human brain inside a computer. “The basic idea” for whole brain emulation (WBE), they write, “is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain.” It’s virtualization, applied to our noggins.
Though “currently only a theoretical technology,” WBE is, the authors say, “the logical endpoint of computational neuroscience’s attempts to accurately model neurons and brain systems” and “may represent a radical new form of human enhancement.” In something of an understatement, they write that “the economic impact of copyable brains could be immense, and could have profound societal consequences.”
The document is a fascinating one, not only in its comprehensive description of “how a brain emulator would work if it could be built and [the] technologies needed to implement it,” but also in its expression of an old-school materialist conception of the human mind (a conception that is in tension with some of neuroscience’s more interesting recent discoveries). The authors’ belief that it is, at least theoretically, possible to build a brain emulator “that is detailed and correct enough to produce the phenomenological effects of a mind” leads them, inevitably, to the issue of free will.
They deal with the problem of free will, or, as they term it, the possibility of a random or “physically indeterministic element” in the working of the human brain, by declaring it a non-problem. They suggest that it can be dealt with rather easily by “including sufficient noise in the simulation … Randomness is therefore highly unlikely to pose a major obstacle to WBE.” And anyway: “Hidden variables or indeterministic free will appear to have the same status as quantum consciousness: while not in any obvious way directly ruled out by current observations, there is no evidence that they occur or are necessary to explain observed phenomena.”
The only way you can emulate a person with a computer is by first defining the person to be a machine. The Future of Humanity Institute would seem to be misnamed.
Q1: Why are non-experts discussing such a topic?
A: There are no experts on this topic.
Q2: Why are these guys planning to scan the brain? Isn’t it better to try and understand the fundamentals instead?
A: Can write a bigger thesis this way.
Q3. Why all this talk of materialism, free will?
A: Because the real topic of intelligence is too complicated.
Q4.Should we all shut up then?
A: Yes. Please…
Seth,
There are three ways in which a physical phenomenon might be beyond emulation: (a) we can describe how to construct a finite emulation but the universe is too small to contain it; (b) we can only describe how to construct a non-finite emulation; (c) emulation is mathematically impossible.
Phenomenon of type (a) would seem to be fairly common. The WBE paper invites us to regard as plausible that the brain is not example of a class (a) phenomenon but the evidence offered is flimsy. On the other hand, the brain qualitatively looks like the kind of chaotic system we wouldn’t be surprised to find in class (a).
Conway showed the existence of real phenomenon in class (c). Moreover, he showed that the phenomenon in class (c) have some essential metaphysical properties in common with an intuitive sense of human choice in a free-will universe: that choices are not prefigured by the history of the universe to that point and that they create meaningful relationships between space-like separated parts of the universe. So perhaps the right question is, as Conway puts it, “why shouldn’t we” find quite plausible that the some essential properties of the mind (such as choice) are a class (c) phenomenon?
Could the mind be of class (b)? Can anything? I’m not sure it can in the sense that a “non-finite emulation” seems to me to be an oxymoron. There may be ways in which a construction that we’d dub “a non-finite emulation” is in some ways descriptive of a phenomenon but it isn’t in any sense an emulation — it can never be carried out even in an infinite universe (because the speed of light ensures the emulation will never reach an infinite size in a finite amount of time).
Looking deeper into the possibility that the brain / mind is a class (c) phenomenon: the structure of the brain is certainly good for amplifying some class (c) phenomenon to create macro-scopic changes in brain structure. The experimenters measuring spin in Conway’s experiment illustrate that. Why should we not suppose that the brain’s structure internally produces examples of class (c) choices and then also amplifies those into macroscopic changes in brain structure? If brain’s do that, then there is no function mapping a brainstate at t0 to its future states — the “mind” is a class (c) phenomenon.
To argue that the mind is not a class (c) phenomenon you would have to argue that although the brain can efficiently amplify the choice of a particle into physical changes to the brain and meaningful changes in the mind, that somehow it just happens to not do so. That seems unlikely.
-t
Nick, what is ‘free will’?
No, seriously. Lots of people throw that term around without really having any clue what it means. Let’s tackle the two most common descriptions:
One: Free Will is the premise that, for any given decision in the past, you could have chosen differently. This is a very common definition; it’s also tautologically true. Yes, you could have chosen differently. You didn’t. Even more importantly, you can’t go back and change the past. You can’t choose differently now that you’ve chosen.
Two: Free Will is the premise that, for any given decision in the future, you can choose different from decisions made in the past. This is a silly, almost absurd definition, because it’s apparently true. Any decision you make in the future will be informed by the consequences of decisions made in the past, as well as any changes in your environment– both external and internal– that have happened in the intervening time. Of course you will weigh the matter differently; you’re a different person at a different place and time. You may well choose differently.
Why do you choose?
That’s the question underlying every choice. Why do you choose? Think about your left hand. Touch your thumb to your pinky. Too late: even before you registered that you were thinking about touching your thumb to your pinky, signals were racing down the nerves in your spine and arm, telling the muscles to get ready for the action, performing the action, and telling your brain that the action had been performed. What we think of “consciousness” and “free will” is an after-effect of some meta-consciousness, some meta-free will, that manifests as interactions with our selves and each other only after the fact. The hundreds of mental modules that regulate us– our hunger, our quest for success, our sex drive, our wish for sleep, our reactions to beauty or to filth– compete for attention, each gaining or losing its voice in the chorus that makes up “you” and “me,” depending upon underlying physical signals– digestion, exhaustion, the presence of a loved one, the demands of work, the learned threat of retaliation.
For all the rationalization that might bubble to the surface of what we call “conscious free will,” we might exhaust all alternative explanations for choosing one way or another, and we come down to tie breakers: simple, illogical, animal emotions. Want and fear. The things that turned Naked African Plains Ape into Homo sapiens, that made us incredible survivors and reproducers on the sveldt. We haven’t graduated from that status just yet.
Nobody in this conversation has yet defined “free will,” so let me throw out Daniel Dennett’s: “Free will is when conscious agent A makes choices without the direct compulsion of another conscious agent.” This is without regard to the underlying, non-conscious processes that cause choice-making to arise in agent A.
The WBE project meets that criteria: until we understand what even a successful WBE is doing, we won’t be able to compel the will of a working WBE. If it’s a successful emulation, its “consciousness” will have as much free will as the rest of us, and one hell of a better opportunity than you or I to introspect. After all, it’ll have access to its own hardware.
Almost by definition that would be an “unfriendly AI.” That ought to frighten the hell out of us.
Elf,
Choice is choice. It’s what people think it is. You try to show otherwise with your “touch your thumb and forefinger” experiment but that doesn’t show anything much new about choice: we already new choice worked like that.
For example, consider the literary trope in which a narrator says something like “When I sat down to decide whether or not to go on the journey I realized that, in fact, already made the decision months ago. I had ordered my affairs, I’d avoided scheduling appointments for after the departure date. More to the point, I saw in retrospect that certain knowledge I would go on the journey was always in the back of my mind ever since that conversation with Dr. Memento….”
It’s not un-common to talk of the action of choice as one that appears in prominent consciousness only in retrospect and, even so, we describe choices in terms of the rich, human subtlety of their meaning with no need to reduce all choice to some kind of simplified “animal instinct”. In literature, choice is commonly understood to be holistic – to have many meanings at once.
-t
Tom, it’s really not acceptable to say “choice is choice.” The mechanism of choice is a mystery, and you seem to be implying that it should stay that way.
I disagree. The walls of mystery are exactly what need to be pulled down. Each choice we make has an underlying rationale.
Let’s put it this way, in the simplest terms possible: You and I are not jittering blobs of uncontrolled plasma, nor are we apparently constantly jerking around like epileptics. We choose to sit still, to have this conversation, to get up for coffee, to go to bed.
Either there is a reason why we do the things we do, either there is a mechanism, a collection of rules, of processes, that lead to each and every choice– or there is not.
I will grant, because I can’t see how it can be otherwise, that some choice mechanisms are probabilistic, even stochastic, but those must go through the essential filters that make us the successful survivors and reproducers that we are. There might even be random event generators in the brain.
But a random event generator is not free will: it’s just randomness. How that randomness mixes into the great stew that is human consciousness and emerges as qualia and behavior is the mystery that needs solving. To argue, as Conway seems to, that your (c) condition is both “free will” (has some meaning) and “inaccessible” (meaning that we cannot grasp) is to consign mankind to hopelessness: whatever we learn about ourselves, it will never be enough. Growth– of Self, of consciousness, of who and what we are as individuals and as humanity– will forever be the stuff of fantasy. I can’t accept that.
We are the subtlest creatures on the planet, but there’s absolutely no reason to throw out Occam and suppose that we’re somehow qualtitatively different from every other species on Earth, right down to the Sphex Wasp. We are certainly quantitatively different: we have more subtlety, show more awareness and self-awareness and consciousness, but I have serious doubts that all of that is a difference of kind.
The WBE experiment is a stab in the dark, but it’s better to take that stab and light that candle than live with ignorance. Carl Sagan once famously described those who believed in supernatural intervention as a living in a “Demon-Haunted World.” The last demon in that haunetd world will be the humunculous that lives behind our own eyeballs.
Not quite. There are three mysteries which we generally accept as axiomatic (or at least as trivial consequences of a more elaborate set of axioms we use). No empirical result has yet disproved these axioms. They are that information travels at finite speed, that the squared spins of certain particles along orthogonal axes is constrained to be a permutation of 1, 1, 0, and that we can entangle two particles such that they have the same squared spins in parallel directions yet are space-like separated. From those three axioms we can prove that such particles exhibit choice in the sense of exhibiting behavior for which no mechanism is mathematically possible because the behavior is indeterminate with respect to the history of the behavior. Yet at the same time the behavior is both real (measurable) and meaningful (conveying truths about space-like separated events).
In other words, no new mystery is posited by saying the electrons “have (at least a primitive kind of) choice”: rather, the existence of that choice is proved from very uncontroversial axioms of physics — some of the best empirically verified axioms we’ve got.
It is unknown if what we call human choice is the same sort of phenomenon or not. It’s a viable hypothesis that it is the same sort of phenomenon because that would explain how human choice can be a real thing with some of the main characteristics we usually attribute to it (like not be prefigured by the past, and being meaningful in the causality-simultaneous universe).
Why say that? It’s not true of the choices of electrons, for any ordinary sense of the word “rationale”. Why deprive human minds of such a capacity, a priori?
And Conway points out that we have well established the reality of meaningful phenomenon for which there are no such rules, given just the three simple axioms. If there were such rules in every case, we would be led to a contradiction (the existence of a mathematical function which we prove separately can not exist). The consistency of the three axioms (at least per Conway, I haven’t followed that reference) is well proved.
There simply are no rules for the electrons in the experiment unless those three non-controversial axioms are false.
Randomness and meaninglessness are not the same thing. The digits of pi are both random and meaningful, for example.
Now, if you think the universe can be shown to be just a set of rules with a random number generator attached then surely we can just as well run the random number generator separately, call it’s output a a new fundamental constant (and recognize that it’s a transcendental number), and combine our rules and that new fundamental constant to produce a function that predicts the outcome of a spin measurement given just the resulting theory and the history of the experiment. Yet we can not for that would lead to a contradiction (no such function can exist without the three axioms being inconsistent and we know our three axioms are consistent — so no such function exists.) It isn’t, in other words, just some rules with an RNG attached.
So: (a) stochastic behavior by the universe (e.g., the distribution of spins in repeated experiments) can be random without being meaningless; (b) you can’t make a complete rule-set for the universe even if we permit your rules to include an infinite table of random numbers.
The choice of an electron can be meaningful, unpredictable, and not determined by any fixed set of rules. E.g., it can exhibit “will”.
In what way is that hopeless? That’s freedom, brother. Becoming predictable, boring old farts, on the other hand — that seems to me like a reasonable definition of hopelessness.
I agree. And go further. At least as a hypothesis, there isn’t a big difference in kind between our selves and, say, an electron — at least as pertains to choice. We can understand and characterize the wasp in great detail. We can understand and characterize the electron with even finer precision and comprehensiveness. Yet the electron retains some meaningful choice, why not the wasp, and why not us?
You find no hope in freedom from constraints?
A superstition is an empirically testable hypothesis that finds no (true) empirical support. What we are talking about here is different: we’re talking about the existence of real and meaningful phenomenon for which we can prove that no consistent hypothesis can exist.
-t
I’ll have to admit I’m a little bit lost about all this talk on free will vs. determinism, and on relating the term “free-will” to anything an electron might do.
It’s my understanding that electrons SEEM to be unpredictable because of two interacting facts — 1) they can occupy any of a multitude of positions in what for lack of a better word might be called an “orbit” about a nucleus, and 2) we have no way of knowing (ever) which one of these positions they’re in at any point in time, without altering the original state in the process. It follows that all we can do practically is to express the PROBABILITY of a certain configuration being true. Thats NOT the same as saying that in reality, an election isn’t at a certain point at a certain time, and it’s certainly not the same as saying that the electron has “choice” or “free will.” All it is saying, is that we can’t know for sure where in the heck the electron is. It’s a limitation of our ultimate investigative abilities, not something built into the Universe.
I see free will in a mind as the same sort of thing. A mind, especially a human mind, is just too complicated to predict, other than by stating probabilities, just as with the orbit of the electron. A mind is so dependent in some ways on slight influences which either are hard to characterize, because they occur at the molecular level; or are synergistic, group effects that exist solely at the functional level of the whole thing. Also, as someone pointed out, a mind is self-programming, which means that the environment and interactions with the environment must occupy a huge share in any of its resulting paradigms or decisions. But once again, I don’t think that that means that someone necessarily has “free-will;” just as with the electron, our inability to predict does not translate into some mysterious power of choice.
Speaking of free-will vs. determinism, I don’t think there is any difference. They are the same thing, just viewed from different points. If the Universe were completely deterministic (and I think it probably is), then people would still think, for example, that they had the choice to touch their nose with their finger, or not. The apparent “choice” is in the mental debating or process of deciding, which, like everything else, could logically completely be determined by it’s antecedents. As an example, in one of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries Holmes outlines to Dr. Watson the latter’s processes of thought, in coming to some conclusion, taking each link in the thought chain as it followed its predecessor. I went back and looked, but unfortunately I couldn’t find the exact passage. Another way to look at this is to say that “choice” is just apparent, because we are self-conscious. If we weren’t self-conscious, the result might be the same, but there would be no question of choice.
One other thing I wanted to point out is that I, and probably some others here, may have mixed up three separate concepts, namely, 1) choice or free-will, 2)consciousness, and 3) intelligence. The first two of these may or may not depend on one another. The third, however, I believe at least can be totally separate. It is possible to built an intelligent machine.
Anyway, enough. I could be wrong on all counts. Unlike Seth, I hated Physics in college. I do agree with Tom Lord that the WBE thing has more to do with grant money than science.
Stephen,
No, it’s not like you think.
You are saying you think it’s possible that the electron has a definite state (position, spin, etc) and that that definite state, combined with a few rules, determines what the electron does next. You allow that we might not be able to *know* this state and hence must model it stochastically, but you reserve the possibility that the definite state exists.
Ok, well, long story short — that is one of the things that Conway proves incorrect. Whether we know the state fully or not at time T0, there is no set of rules that give the state at T1 — no “function” mapping a T0 state to a T1 state.
-t
Yet the electron retains some meaningful choice, why not the wasp, and why not us? You find no hope in freedom from constraints?
No, and I know exactly why. In all of this, we’ve talked about freedom. About how we’re not slaves to determinism, about how, despite all the underlying influences that might be deterministic, there’s an element of freedom.
The problem with this freedom is that it’s exactly like the freedom we describe in a 3D video game: the degrees of freedom describe the viewpoint’s capability to move, to turn, to look.
Nowhere does it describe why one would move at all. The difference between you and I is that in the phrase ‘free will,’ you concentrate on the word ‘free.’
I concentrate on the word ‘will.’
Freedom to jerk about randomly isn’t freedom; it’s just jerking around randomly. What you’ve proposed is that the metaconsciousness that makes decisions and announces them to our consciousness has a tie-breaker no better than the roll of a die. Even if that tie-breaker has its own set of rules, those rules are inaccessible to us.
Yes, I find that a hopeless, even pathological condition. How is that “will?” How is that by any stretch of the definition the person who is me making a decision? Weighing the pros and cons. Coming to a conclusion. Acting on it.
I really hope that Litt, Eliasmith, Kroon, et. al. in their paper “Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?” have it right: no, it is not. There is no reason to believe that the brain needs anything more than mere biochemistry to explain itself. That we are temporally involved machines and nothing else.
(This is why I’m unimpressed with Nick’s carting out these plasticity articles; of course the brain reacts to the environment– including its own thoughts, over the passage of time– that’s what a good evolutionarily adapted brain does. To find this “remarkable” now is to get all of your news from screamsheet media but to be otherwise unaware of the last twenty years of the interaction between evolutionary biology and neurophysiology.)
Because if we are extraordinarily, wonderfully complex but nonetheless definite and finite machines, the progression of which through time can be grasped and codified, than our will is within our reach. It is free, even if it’s wholly deterministic: it has the one variety of free will worth wanting, the will to make future choices free of the compulsion of other willful agents. We can grasp the knobs and dials of who we are, turn them up, turn them down, make of ourselves whatever we want. Passion, focus, harmony: we will have undiluted access to each and every individual’s bliss, free to follow as we will. We can reach substrate independence, no longer locked into the bubbling, decaying meat that is our legacy.
We will not only have the one definition of free will worth wanting: we will have the freedom to embrace, or enhance, or even reject the human condition. And that’s a future for which we should earnestly strive.
This is why I’m unimpressed with Nick’s carting out these plasticity articles; of course the brain reacts to the environment– including its own thoughts, over the passage of time– that’s what a good evolutionarily adapted brain does. To find this “remarkable” now is to get all of your news from screamsheet media but to be otherwise unaware of the last twenty years of the interaction between evolutionary biology and neurophysiology.
This is a bit of an overstatement, Elf. Yes, in retrospect, we can see the steadily mounting evidence of neuroplasticity, and, yes, that evidence has become pretty much overwhelming over the last 20 or 30 years (and, no, I’m not suggesting otherwise), but that doesn’t change the fact that neuroplasticity was long treated as heresy by mainstream neuroscience, which perpetuated the idea of the adult brain as a mechanism, the fixed and specialized parts of which determined our thoughts and perceptions in a one-way relationship. And that mechanistic view, entrenched for a couple of centuries, continues to influence broader public perceptions about the brain and the mind.
As for implying that the evolutionary biologists deserve credit for breakthroughs in our understanding of neuroplasticity, that’s just wrongheaded. Neuroplasticity in fact calls into question (explicitly, if you read the literature) some of the assumptions of the evolutionary biologists, who have tended to argue that our thoughts and perceptions have been determined, in a rigid way, by our evolutionary past.
But, anyway, thanks for contributing to a fascinating discussion.
Nick
Elf,
Very briefly (and repeating myself), your assumption that the choices of the electron are simply “random” is unjustified. If you do repeated spin experiments the outcomes have a random distribution, sure, but this does not mean that they are meaningless any more than it means the digits of pi are meaningless.
On the basis of that mistake you plead for the importance of “transhuman freedoms” but I don’t see it: either the justification you’re offering, or the realistic prospects. Your metaphor of “grabbing our own knobs” seems apt, but perhaps not in the way you meant, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, you do leave me with this image of a an imagined future in which Wallmart is having a holiday shopping season special on “post-human kits” which the happy consumer can take home and apply to themselves or their loved ones, effectively replacing themselves an equivalent or superior worker drone who, nevertheless, can’t help but enjoy it’s time on earth owing to all the special effects added to its perception.
-t
Modeling the brain alone is insufficient. There are countless numbers of proteins produced by other parts of the body which affect brain function, and ignoring their vital role in brain activity is a gigantic misstep.
Adrenal glands, genitals, hormones. Even nutrients provided by our diet. These all affect our thinking on a moment-by-moment basis. They are not mere accessories to the brain, but vitally entwined with it.
Modeling a brain alone without input from these other body systems is like modeling a car engine and not including a gas tank. Pretty useless.
DJFarkus,
Yeah, that’s a big gaping whole in the WBE paper.
A fine example of the point is that they want to model pet-scale mammals well enough that, for example, the personality traits of a pet are recognizable: a fine example of where the individual quirks of blood chemistry are going to be vital. (And, look at what they say about “haptics”.)
It’s a very quaint little retro piece, that paper. Could have been written in the 1930s, mostly, with just a slight change in vocabulary and choices of handwaving cites.
-t
Nick, I think the problem is here, where you say “the idea of the adult brain as a mechanism, the fixed and specialized parts of which determined our thoughts and perceptions in a one-way relationship …”
Taking you at not going New Age, I think what you mean is more like “the idea of the adult brain as a rigid and inflexible mechanism …”. Mechanisms can be flexible, can have feedback loops and react to their environment (a thermostat does so, to give a very simple example).
This has nothing to do with quantum blahblahblah or free will.
Indeed, to use deliberate computer terms, it’s just saying something like “We used to think everything was a dedicated line, but we’ve learned there’s in fact a lot of connection pooling and load-based resource allocation”. And this how knowledge gained from relatively simple software engineering helps in understanding how the brain works.
Nick:
>>The mind does actually seem to exist, and
>> thoughts seem to exert a physical influence
>> on the structure of the brain.
The problem with the “ghost in the machine” model of conciousness that you seem to be expounding on here, it that it is simply not supported by scientific research. Cat scan and EEG studies have showed that brain activity preceededs perception by several milliseconds. What that means is that awareness or perception of actions that we think are part of “free will” actually comes AFTER the nuerons have fired NOT before. Seems that “free will” is a literal “after thought” due to complex processing of neural inputs for prior to perception and action.
Nick:
>>The mind does actually seem to exist, and
>> thoughts seem to exert a physical influence
>> on the structure of the brain.
The problem with the “ghost in the machine” model of conciousness that you seem to be expounding on here, it that it is simply not supported by scientific research. Cat scans and EEG studies have showed that brain activity preceededs perception by several milliseconds. What that means is that awareness or perception of actions that we think are part of “free will” actually comes AFTER the nuerons have fired NOT before. Seems that “free will” is a literal “after thought” due to complex processing of neural inputs for prior to perception and action.
Enough, enough already, do rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions? The relationship between freedom and cause might help one to understand whether the laws of “nature” are causally deterministic. Then one would need to consider the question, what is “human” freedom?
The long thread demonstrates that there might be no definitive answer but we all would like to understand just what this all means.
The thought that the human brain can be replicated, road mapped, “”whole brain emulation,” “a fully functional human brain inside a computer” come on! Achieving anything even remotely similar by using computers in just nonsense, maybe fun or a good exercise in trying to convince one another, but fruitless.
Did Nick exercise free will in posting this article? Thank god he has much more than a modicum of intelligence and yes, he exercised its complementary element, humor, by posting the last two sentences.
http://mreditor.logoscomics.com/_photos/Adam%20and%20Eve.jpg
Alan
Linuxguru1968, you wrote:
That is a common, mistaken belief. Those experiments show only that (considering for example, various kinds of choice) that the beginnings of choice and its full manifestation — a full appreciation of it — is spread out over time.
In a comment above I gave an example of a literary trope that shows how this is really nothing new: we’ve known that about ourselves for the longest time as when someone says “When I sat down to make the decision, I realized I’d already inwardly decided months prior… I’d already made my choice.”
Experiments such as you describe show only that this also happens on much smaller time-scales than we usually talk about.
The experiment Conway talks about, and his analysis of it — measurements of the squared spin of space-like separated twinned particles — takes it a step further. That experiment shows a form of very small-scale choice which is “really choice” (in the sense of being meaningful, consequential, and not prefigured by history) yet which also does not correspond to any single event in space-time. “Ghostly” isn’t a bad choice of word to describe such a choice.
-t
Alan,
In citing Nick’s humor (“The Future of Humany institute would seem to be misnamed” because their first step here is to redefine “human” as a kind of “machine”) — that hits on why there’s more to Nick’s attention here than just calling out a bad philosophy paper. Freedom is at stake.
For, let’s suppose that that a prestigious group of elites manages to promote a redefinition of “human” as a “kind of machine” and, being elites, their redefinition takes hold among all kinds of powerful elites (e.g., judges, or research ethics committees, etc.). All of the rules those elites use in general — the rules that refer to “human” one way or another — now have a new, retroactive, socially effective interpretation.
In other words, a paper such as the one being torn to shreds here, if widely enough accepted, can cause many humans to be (more than already) treated as machines by more powerful people.
That’s what’s really at stake when a paper like this comes out of Oxford.
-t
Tom you make a really important point, one that had not entered my consciousness regarding this conversation.
Suffice it to say it’s already well underway on several fronts not least of which are rights, homeland security and the associated change of attitudes/mind warp toward the general public that appears to be firmly entrenched already!
Boil all the elements down that might be connected to the dangers you mentioned and one must surely end up with two words that define the problem, common sense and the diminished appurtenances thereto.
It would be an interesting study to look back and define the process that started with the disciplines and enabled a narrowing of perceptions that led to the present disconnects!
I must add that I am not anti science just anti mindlessness!
Warm regards, Alan
Tom, that’s exactly an argument some Creationists give to oppose Evolution – they say that if humans are biological animals like any other, then that, if widely enough accepted, can cause many humans to be (more than already) treated as animals by more powerful people. But rejecting Evolution because of Social Darwinism is multiple abuse of science.
Seth,
Many bad arguments are given on both sides of, for example, the “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design” debate and it would not be fair of you to ask me to defend any of those bad arguments that I did not myself offer up as an argument.
I will say this:
The (hereby dubbed) Defensible Intelligent Design Hypothesis says:
The defensible hypothesis is looking pretty good in terms of Conway’s proof. And that means, oddly enough, that a “teach the controversy” answer to the intelligent-design-controversy in schools is sane, if it is done well. The lesson is that the truth or falsehood of a carefully stated form of intelligent design is not a scientific question — neither side (who claims that this form of ID is true or false) is speaking other than out of personal faith, not science.
-t
Tom, I lost you somewhere. I know this is oversimplifying, but you seem to be smuggling in what’s called the “It’s only a THEORY” Creationist argument – the one which runs “Creationism is a THEORY, Evolution is a THEORY, neither theory can be proven absolutely, so both deserve respect”. And it’s nonsense because some theories fit the world much better than others, in complicated ways hard to explain in a comment-box, but that shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of the difference.
Again, in a most technical sense you might not be saying that, but what you write comes across as confusingly close.
Now, I’m not saying information processing science is the be-all and end-all of studying the mind – but it has so much scientific understanding to offer that it’s absurd to be playing logical games of you-can’t-prove-it’s-NOT-so.
I may have missed it, but I don’t think Tom provided a link to that Conway and Kochen paper. So here it is (2008 version).
It surprises me that, at this late date, anyone is taking Dualism at all seriously, just as I’d be surprised if someone took Vitalism seriously.
We know that alterations to the brain – damage, chemicals, electrical or magnetic stimuli, etc. – can change consciousness, personality, memory, pretty much every characteristic we consider to be “mental.”
We know that alternations in consciousness can change the operation of the brain.
We have no evidence of consciousness that isn’t associated with a living brain.
Why believe, now, today, that there’s some “ghost”, some immaterial “special ingredient” necessary for consciousness? Where is the evidence to support such a belief? Why give serious consideration to the position that “the mind” or “consciousness” are anything other than emergent phenomena of the operation of the nervous system?
Assuming The “Strong Free Will Theorem” is true, and assuming that indeterminacy at the level of electrons translates to indeterminacy at the level of neurons (which is by no means a given), that just tells us that we can’t perfectly simulate a brain’s future output… but what it doesn’t do is tell us we can’t instantiate a software version of a brain.
It may well be that the Whole Brain Emulation effort won’t actually lead to the emulation of a brain… and that’s fine. We’ll still learn something along the way. We won’t know unless we try. Just sitting around saying “It’s impossible” won’t get us anywhere useful.
As for “Intelligent Design”, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trials put it in the dustbin of history. I think it best we leave it there.