Uploading Souls, Part 3

Table of Contents

to Part 1 Introduction, What is a soul? What about uploading? Why this topic?

A biological aside: vitalism (separate document)

to Part 2, Where do new souls come from? Is the soul separate from the body? The mind-body question.

What about the brain and computers?

Computer consciousness?

Conclusion

What about the brain and computers?

One of the reasons I got into all this was reading about Kevin Warwick. As the Kevin Warwick Watch page points out, the man is a publicity hound. But he is a real university professor who is using himself as a guinea pig in interfacing the nervous system and computers. He implanted a transponder in his arm in 1998. It sent out a signal that turned on his computer. He has bigger plans. See Salon for further information. (Warwick has written a book, I, Cyborg, apparently published only in the UK as of August 2002. For a review--actually more of an attack, implying that Warwick's main accomplishment is getting publicity, see here.) On the very day that this chapel was presented, November 16, 2000, an article on using the signals from monkey's brains to manipulate an artificial arm appeared in Nature. (See the article by Mussa-Ivaldi, pp. 305-6, or the research that he is commenting on, later in the same issue.) Some progress has indeed been made in interfacing brains and computers. On May 2, 2002, articles appeard in newspapers, stating that a rat can be controlled (in the sense of determining which direction it will go in) with three electrodes, one for turning right, one for left, and one in the reward center. (Warwick isn't the only person actively involved in this area. Stelarc is an artist "whose work explores and extends the concept of the body and its relationship with technology through human-machine interfaces incorporating medical imaging, prosthetics, robotics, VR systems and the Internet.")

Interfacing is one thing. Transferring is a different one. There's a big gap, so far, between a human mind and a computer. The human brain is a carbon-based entity, with thoughts apparently being electrical signals, changed into chemical ones as they go between cells. Our memories are at least partly due to physical connections which grow between our nerve cells as we have experiences. Our instincts are transmitted from generation to generation in DNA. What, if anything, does this have to do with a silicon-based computer, wherein memories are stored as patterns of magnetism? True, we have started to work on DNA-based computing, and what passes for thinking in a computer is electrical signaling, more or less, but we are a long way from saving a brain to a computer file. Some of you have had the experience of reading a Microsoft Works document into Microsoft Office. The results often include various extraneous material as well as the information you want. If it is so difficult to get a clean translation between two applications made by the same company, perhaps running on the same computer, imagine the greater difficulty in changing a computer file to thought, or the reverse. Will it be possible? Only God knows.

There are those who believe that interfacing computers and human consciousness is going to happen. The theme appears in some science fiction works. For a recent example, read Genesis by Poul Anderson (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2001). Anderson writes about the technology of the near future allowing human consciousness to communicate directly with robot consciousness, then, as the technology evolves, about human personality (consciousness ?, souls?) being integrated into a larger non-biological consciousness, and, at need, copies of such a consciousness being downloaded into machines or artificially created human beings.

The Transhumanist FAQ of the World Transhumanist Organization says that:

Some posthumans may even find it advantageous to get rid of their bodies and live as information patterns on large super-fast computer networks. It is sometimes said that it is impossible for us humans to imagine what it would be like to be a posthuman. They may have activities and aspirations that we can’t even begin to fathom, much as an ape could never hope to understand the complexities of a human life.

Chris Hables Gray has written a book, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York: Routledge, 2001), with an extensive companion web site,

N. Kathleen Hayles has written How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (Chicago: U. of Chicago, 1999) To an excerpt from the book. Here is a speech/presentation by Hayles, apparently covering much the same territory as the book, entitled How We Became Posthuman: Humanistic Implications of Recent Research into Cognitive Science and Artificial Life. One of Hayles' themes is, as she puts it, "how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded." (p. 2) The book, and also the presentation, expand on this theme. Hayles says this:

Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world; and embodiment is always instantiated. Once the specific form constituting it is gone, no amount of massaging data will bring it back. (How We Became Posthuman, p. 49)

Perhaps the most ambitious thoughts about soul uploading (which he calls downloading) are those of Frank J. Tipler, a mathematical physicist with an interest in computers and information. (See the quote near the top of the first of these pages) He says "Eventually, mind children will engulf the entire universe! In fact, they must eventually engulf the universe if they are to survive. In fact, the laws of physics require them to eventually engulf the entire universe and take control of the universe!" ("From 2100 to the End of Time," article published in Wired, but from Tipler's own web site.) If that doesn't seem ambitious, then surely this will: "So our mind children at the end of time will be omniscient (they will know everything that can be known); they will be omnipotent (they will have infinite energy, controlling all the energy resources in the universe), and they are omnipresent (they are ubiquitous throughout the universe). It is interesting that God's Name, as given in Exodus 3:14, is in the original Hebrew Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, which translates into English as I SHALL BE WHAT I SHALL BE." Statements like these strike me as not just ambitious, but blasphemous. Tipler is claiming, in no uncertain terms, that our consciousnesses, uploaded, or downloaded, into quantum computers, will be gods.

Table of contents

Computer consciousness?

So maybe computers can capture our signals, or send signals to us. What about computer consciousness? I quote from James Trefil:

Rafael E. Núñez says that the question of whether computers can think has largely disappeared--it's not asked much anymore. He says that it was found that ". . . even the simplest everyday aspects of human thought, such as common sense, sense of humor, spontaneous metaphorical thought, use of counterfactuals in natural language, to mention only a few, were in fact intractable for the most sophisticated machines." It is, of course, possible to suppose that, as more sophisticated computers appear, they will become tractable. However, if that is true, then uploading one's soul to a currently insufficiently sophisticated computer would seem to be futile.

Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, who believes that the mind and the body are not separable, says:

Logic can be “imparted” and robots can be programmed. But that is not consciousness, which cannot arise from pre-defined information, but rather from the ability to self-organize, recognize patterns, learn and evolve on its own. Even if we one day had conscious artifacts, they wouldn’t be like us. They wouldn’t have our body and our evolved neural circuitry and the body that make us what we are. Machines might become intelligent one day, perhaps even conscious, but they will not be human.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The purpose of this is NOT to prevent use by others, but to prevent other users from restricting free use. I claim no ownership of materials in the above material which are quotations from other sources.