Editor's Blog
Anders Sandberg discussed whole brain emulation, and how we might perhaps accomplish it by mid-century, along with numerous examples of brain scanning and visualization technology.
An audience member asked if, since all life and brains begin with a single cell, had he considered growing a brain. Anders replied that he had done the calculations, but that the cell dividing that would be required (to grow both the brain and the body) that would have to be developed in order to grow the brain properly would require a lot of computing power.
Next, Randal Koene gave a differently focused presentation on whole brain emulation, and the benefits WBE will bring to mankind. He also discussed some of the more technical aspects of WBE, such as using phantom data sets for validation that can allow you to test your reconstruction algorighm.
An audience member asked if Randal would give the emulated brains a choice about whether or not they wanted to participate in the experiments that had been created for, and he took the question very seriously. "Absolutely — if you’ve got something that thinks like we do, what’s the difference there."
This immediately aroused the audience’s attention. Just what is it we are talking about creating here. Another audience member asked a question about creating "copies" of our consciousness, and how, of course, each copy would be different, and Randal agreed. "Every copy of a brain will have its own set of self awareness, unless you believe there is something intrinsic about the biology."
What do you think about the ethical implications of growing brains in the laboratory for upload and storage research? Let us know your thoughts here on the blog.
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You cannot unthink thoughts. Certain thoughts change you, fundamentally, permanently. That’s what makes progress, and the spread of transhumanism, inevitable. This is one of them. Once you get it, there’s no going back. Welcome to the world of . . . not souls, not identities . . . instantiations.
Creating minds has drawbacks. Especially meaty minds. I think it’s unethical to create sentient minds made of meat given their abysmal success rate (or spectacular failure rate) at doing anything useful except feeling mostly pain amid the occasional pleasure, unless you define feeling pleasure and pain as particularly useful.
Instead create different kinds of minds. Made of different stuff, operating under different rules. Start from scratch. Enough of meaty minds.
Are not pleasure and pain the primary stimuli that push us forward in life? It seems (to me at least) that most decisions made generally involve heading towards one and avoiding the other. Otherwise I can’t see how they’re going to motivate a conciousness to do anything except sit around eating Cheetos and posting in Yahoo Answers.
This is great fun to think about. It’s amusingly like what I would do if I met up with parallel universe versions of myself. I’ll do my best to still be breathing 40 years from now when this shows up.
How do I know I am not already a manufactured consciousness?
Hey, yeah! And on top of that, how do you know if you’re really alive right now? You might be dead! Better go jump off a bridge and find out.
The questions and answers discussed in this report suggest an assumption by the participants that real sentience is strictly a matter of assembling the right algorithms, memory and computing power. Though brain emulation is a fascinating goal, I am not sure that these assumptions won’t result in disappointment.
Despite an absence of proof or any particular religious inclinations, I do “believe there is something intrinsic about the biology”. As biologic beings, perhaps we are uniquely entitled to make such leaps of faith. Either way, I am not at all certain how we could evaluate the difference between real sentience and a perfect mimicry. At the end of the day, I am left only with “Cogito, ergo sum.” That is all I can know with certainty. Everything else requires some amount of faith.
We duplicate our brains all the time with old fashioned reproduction. Children. If we start duplicating our intelligences, it’s just having more kids, silicon or carbon. If the intelligences have all our memories and experiences, then we’ve cloned our brains. Not really anything to be too frightened of.
The big hurdle will be determining what rights our consciousness copies will have. It’ll be pretty easy to stuff a voting ballot box at one conciousness = 1 vote. Just make 100 or 1000 copies, and how many votes count?
Considering that the duplicated brains will probably be running at rates far faster than we poor protein built slugs, elections for biologicals might not have relevance anymore. I know that my brain copies will masquerade as the bio version of me for property rights, in order to become obscenely wealthy. If nothing else, they’ll telecommute to hundreds of different jobs and funnel the money back to me. They’ll know they can trust me, and I know that if I screw them over, they will get even.
This is great fun to think about. It’s amusingly like what I would do if I met up with parallel universe versions of myself. I’ll do my best to still be breathing 40 years from now when this shows up.
The big early ethical issue will likely be the moral uncertainty about whether the simulations/emulations are having real experience. Am I allowed to pinch the tail of a virtual mouse if it would be wrong to do so to a real lab mouse? Adherents to functionalism like me would believe it would be wrong to do so, people who think there is something special with biology wouldn’t – but if the simulation works, it will be impossible to tell the difference. So most likely we ought to err on the side of ethical caution and ensure the proper treatment of such software – but there is going to be a lot of discussion. Some of this caution is going to slow research, which is going to annoy us researchers (just consider primate research). Eventually it will likely be (mostly) settled when the first sceptic is scanned and changes opinion about his philosophical position when he experiences existence as software (or the functionalist emulation discovers that she is nonconscious).
There is much more to say about brain emulation ethics, I promise a paper about it in the near future. None of the basic problems look insurmountable, but the long-term impact of working brain emulation is going to be so big that even minor issues would be weighty.
I think that the bio-Luddites usually fail to take into careful consideration that accepting to manipulate the nature ( e.g making new physical/chemical infrastructures) as long as it does not mean manipulating living parts of nature is a semantic paradox. In other words, nature is nature.
Thinking and talking about the frightening consequences of the synthetic DNA technology, for example, is nothing new in the historical context of human civilization. In fact, quite to the contrary, we have done a terrific job to come in terms with, and even forget, many similar doomsday prophecies about shifting from carriages to automobiles, from paper-based communication to paper-less communication, from hierarchical societies to networked societies, from arrows to machine guns, from torches to lamps and etc. The shift from natural to artificial life forms is likely to be in line with these rather old shifts which we finally could get used to them. True, that human beings are facing again a host of unknowns or God knows, but this should not simply be translated to sheer apprehensive thoughts.
To further my point I’d like to refer to an essay, “On Nature”, written by J.S Mill published in 1874.
In his well-thought definition,
“Nature is the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things. Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce them; including not only all that happens, but all that is capable of happening; the unused capabilities of causes being as much a part of the idea of Nature as those which take effect… [Nature] is a collective name for all facts, actual and possible; or (to speak more accurately) a name for the mode, partly known to us and partly unknown, in which all things take place.”
But certain people tend to perceive nature as “things as they would be, apart from human intervention”. If we mean by nature what is happening then we cannot do anything about it, we ourselves are, psychosomatically, part of this happening. But if we mean by nature what is happening without our intervention, then the best course of action for us would be absolute inaction! Hence, I am inclined to conclude that nature is nature.
I have no objection to be anxious about the future consequences of technosciece and even sound some alarms. But I do object to make a meaningless contrast between artificial and natural.
Again to quote Mill:
“Art is as much Nature as anything else; and everything which is artificial is natural – Art has no independent powers of its own: Art is but the employment of the powers of Nature for an end.”
You know even the common cause of ethical choice and action is, too, very natural in itself.
By using the term bio-Luddite I simply intend to make strong my point that certain people just feel objections to any change brought about technological progress. They try to keep the status quo as much and as long as they can. No more connotation is intended.
If certain people prefer not to intervene just because it is not yet known the full aspects of genetic manipulations, one should ask in which part of our civilization on this planet we were 100% sure that we did know enough before action?
Accepting nature as it is happening might even be significantly immoral. Consider many people, children and adults, who are daily suffering from this cruel and unjust nature.
I am not prescribing sheer optimistic thought, nonetheless. In my view, the experience of facing biotechnology’s novel products is not essentially different than the experience of facing, for example, machine gun manufacturing instead of arrow making. We have learned to adapt ourselves. Mill again:
“The duty of man is to cooperate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating, but by perpetually striving to amend, the course of nature – and bringing that part of it over which we can exercise control more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness.”
Evidently, in regard to DNA manipulations, the risk profile is salient. However, to understand our willingness to take risks we should adhere to the basic principle of any risk taking decision, that is:
“The more desirable the better consequences of a risk profile relative to the poorer consequences, the more willing you will be to take the risks necessary to get them.” (see Smart Choices by Hammond et al)
In some people’s mental model, I might guess, the poorer consequences are not appropriately pictured or weighted. To this one can add the second principle of any risk taking actions, that is:
“The more likely the outcomes with better consequences and the less likely the outcomes with poorer consequences, the more desirable the risk profile to you.”
Perhaps you are right that the poorer consequences are more likely. But for me the better consequences compensate for even slim probability of reaching to the outcomes with better consequences.
I think it’s unlikely that an emulated brain is going to simply be produced and instantly bloom into perfect consciousness and self awareness. Expect that the road to emulation will be littered with all sorts of cognitively impaired, hallucinating, damaged, effectively comatose, and otherwise not-entirely-functional thinking machines before the bugs are hammered out . . . the line where an emulated brain becomes capable of making a rational and informed decision about its own desires and well being is going to be fuzzy.
There’s going to be a lot of moral ambiguity in how they’re treated–no right and wrong here.
For anyone interested, Fred Pohl explores the idea of a copied consciousness existing in addition to the original in some of the later novels of his “Heechee” series.
“Either way, I am not at all certain how we could evaluate the difference between real sentience and a perfect mimicry.”
If there’s no way to evaluate the difference, then how could the so-called “something intrinsic” possibly matter? If there’s no test to distinguish them, there’s no point in doing so arbitrarily.
Machines, being our slaves, should not be made to suffer from their slavery. Since we are their creators, we can deny them the self-awareness necessary for them to notice drudgery, monotony, and lack of fulfillment. What we need is more sophisticated ways for machines to follow our instructions. We do not need to create a thing with a will. There are seven billion of those, take your pick. No, what we need are machines that do not tire, do not bore, do not crave stimulation, and are physically capable of the type of decision making and physical labor that a human is. Creativity and the Id should be our domain.