anyway, the more i read up on Kurzweil views, the more i think that he can’t be classified as a reductionist (he calls himself a “patternist”). take for example this quote from Kurzweil in his debate on machine consciousness:

“So some people feel that actual consciousness doesn’t exist, since it’s not a scientific concept, it’s just an illusion, and we shouldn’t waste time talking about it. That’s not fully satisfactory, in my view, because our whole moral and ethical and legal system is based on consciousness. If you cause suffering to some other conscious entity, that’s the basis of our legal code and ethical values. Some people describe some magical or mystical property to consciousness. There were some elements in David’s remarks, say, in terms of talking about a new node of consciousness and how that would suddenly emerge from software.

“My view is it’s an emergent property of a complex system. It’s not dependent on substrate. But that is not a scientific view, because there’s really no way to talk about or to measure the subjective experience of another entity. We assume that each other are conscious. It’s a share human assumption. But that assumption breaks down when we go out of shared human experience. The whole debate about animal rights has to do with are these entities actually conscious. Some people feel that animals are just machines in the old-fashioned sense of that term, not—there’s nobody really home. Some people feel that animals are conscious. I feel that my cat’s conscious. Other people don’t agree. They probably haven’t met my cat, but —(laughter)

“But then the other view is apparent consciousness, an entity that appears to be conscious, and that will require emotional intelligence. There are several reasons why I feel that we will achieve that in a machine, and that has to do with the acceleration of information technology—and this is something I’ve studied for several decades.”

that said, i’m really looking forward to a Kurzweil/Wilber (intellectual) showdown and see what gives. and since you are one of the ENext peeps, why don’t you set up a Kurzweil v. Wilber on machine consciousness? i’d be the first in line to buy that issue :)

in the meantime, allow me to speculate. based on Kurzweil’s response to Kevin Kelly’s attack, Kurzweil might fend off Wilber by saying that: “Some people really are resistant to accepting this exponential perspective, and they’re very smart people. ” :)

~C

I didn’t realize Ben Goertzel was the same guy who wrote that “Enlightenment 2.0″ piece! Very cool. Everyone at the conference knew who he was, though, judging by the applause he got when he took the stage. I was reading thru the first Buddhist Geeks transcript–Goertzel used to live just down the road from here, “out in the middle of the woods” of Western Mass–but I didn’t get the impression that he has a different position on the feasibility of imbuing computers with consciousness than that of most AI researchers…

That argument from the Dalai Lama you linked to, however, seems much more plausible and along the lines of that excerpt from Wilber I quoted above. He’s basically saying that you can’t create consciousness from scratch, because consciousness is a continuity (of holons, or actual occasions, or incarnations), but that a stream of consciousness could conceivably inhabit an “artificial” vehicle (like a computer). So you can’t just install AI program on your MacBook and expect it to be self-aware. Zeros and ones and CPUs do not constitute consciousness. No “thing” constitutes consciousness. Rather, everything that exists is constituted in, and of, consciousness.

Still, I think we’ll be able to create AI beings in the relatively near future that will be virtually indistinguishable from ordinary human beings. But “virtually” is the key word.

(Here’s a cool YouTube video addressing the stark dearth of women at the Singularity Summit, and also pointing out how women seem more inclined to address issues of consciousness or spirit, as opposed to all those cold, disembodied, abstract males–at least according to these women…)

that said, regarding consciousness downloading into a computer the Dalai Lama seems to be more down with the idea than Wilber. see http://bit.ly/DVClu – and last time i checked the Dalai Lama is not one of those “geeky adolescent males who can’t get laid”… geeky “who can’t get laid” maybe, but adolescent, far from it! :)

~C

P.S. Ben Goertzel is one of those working on AI (or AGI) who has a different perspective on consciousness – http://personallifemedia.com/guests/2289-ben-goertzel

Kurzweil also spoke to that a bit, which was surprising–he had a healthy respect for the complexity of consciousness. But it was amazing how little most of these guys actually think about consciousness or even mention the word. And when you see how they’re thinking about AI, it makes sense: AIs don’t need to be “conscious” in order to be seemingly conscious and virtually indistinguishable from human beings. As for genuine self-aware bots, Ken’s comments in the footnotes of A Theory of Everything still seem spot-on to me. Here are some choice excerpts, from pp. 171-172:

The problem with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics is that most of its advocates are naive psychologists with an astonishingly impoverished view of consciousness, what it is and how it develops. If you look at the UL quadrant, you can trace the history (and the constitutive holons) of human consciousness: the prehension of atoms and molecules is taken up into the irritability of cells, which is taken up into the sensations of neuronal organisms, which are taken up into the perceptions of animals with neural cords, which are taken up into the impulses of animals with reptilian brain stems, which are taken up and into the emotions and feelings of animals with limbic systems, which are taken up and into the symbols and concepts of animals with a neocortex, at which point the complex neo-cortex, in certain human brains, can produce formal operational thinking or logic. But each and every one of those holons, enfolded into its successors, is a crucial part of the net result, human consciousness….

In order to produce an artificial intelligence that is truly human-like, AI engineers would have to be able to recreate the consciousness of each and every holon making up the superholon of human consciousness. They would have to be able to create and animate everything from cell irritability to reptilian instincts to limbic-system emotions to neocortex rationality and connectivity (a neocortex that has more neuronal connections than there are stars in the known universe). AI is not even close to being able to recreate organic cell irritability, so we can, for the foreseeable future, ignore its other grandiose claims….

There is another major difficulty: consciousness is a four-quadrant affair. AI is trying to program merely UR-quadrant behavioral rules and learning mechanisms, and that will never produce the four-quadrant thing we call real consciousness….

Finally, there is the argument from deep-spirituality itself: consciousness is not the product of anything, whether that be human brains or robots. Pure consciousness is instead the Source and Ground of all manifestation, and if you think you can put that into a computer . . . The computer is a manifestation of consciousness, not vice versa, and all that you can get into (or out of) a computer is, again, nothing but a thin, partial, superficial slice of the incredible Kosmic Pie. Besides, this whole notion that consciousness can be downloaded into microchips comes mostly from geeky adolescent males who can’t get laid and stay up all hours of the night staring into a computer screen, dissociating, abstracting, dissolved in disembodied thinking. I’m a geek myself, so don’t get me wrong, but please. . . . There are more holons in human consciousness than are dreamt of in AI.

And when Ken spoke about the possibility of genuinely self-aware robots at the end of Boomeritis, it was in line with what he said above: entities whose holonic complexity recapitulates every holonic stage in the makeup of human consciousness, whose physical composition involves some biotechnological fusion of carbon and silicon (or at least some way of infusing life-force or prana into the system, which Ken speculates is actually zero-point energy), and whose existence is far, far away from anything we’re even close to coming up with in the foreseeable future. I think Ken’s inclusion of prana as a prerequisite for genuine artificial life is important, but I also think it goes beyond that: for human-level self-awareness, or even mammalian awareness, you’d need to replicate or at least create a conduit for the soul…which means taking into account all the gradations of subtle energies in the right-quadrant domains, from etheric to astral to mental to psychic to deeper psychic to causal.

And in line with (but expanding on) Deno Kazanis‘s theory, I suspect that all of those gradations of subtle energy may turn out to be what’s currently called dark matter, with the causal body (UR/LR) corresponding to space itself, and the most primal, low-level (right-quadrant) manifestation of Eros corresponding to dark energy.

So, given that scientists have no clue what dark matter and dark energy are and thus aren’t anywhere close to being able to manipulate or control them, I think that genuinely self-aware AI beings (and/or robots), who could pass the Turing test even in direct dialogue with a human enlightened master, are a long ways off. :)

btw, so when it comes to singularity and transhumanism, do you still agree with Wilber’s and Cohen’s interpretation? in my case, i’ve always taken the side of Kurzweil on this one (at least the Right-hand quad :) see my old post ~ http://www.c4chaos.com/2006/02/immortality-enlightenment-singularity )

anyway, keep the geekiness flowing… :)

~C