The (non)existence of an immaterial soul or mind has been a longtime philosophical interest of mine. I’ve done several OPs on the subject at TSZ, so when I ran across the book The Substance of Consciousness — A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, I knew I’d want to take a closer look.
The authors are Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland. Rickabaugh is unfamiliar to me. He’s a self-described “public philosopher” and a former professor of philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Moreland is someone whose views I’ve criticized in past threads. He’s currently a professor of philosophy at Biola University in southern California (formerly known as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), an evangelical institution.
Substance dualism is the view that humans consist of two distinct “substances”: matter, which is physical, and the mind or soul, which is nonphysical. Many religious belief systems including Christianity depend on substance dualism as a way to explain how an afterlife is possible. As a professor at an evangelical institution, Moreland is naturally drawn to the topic.
The book is over 400 pages long and covers a lot of ground, so I’ll have to read it in bits and pieces as time permits. I figured I’d start a thread on it here at TSZ to record my thoughts as I work through it and to discuss it with anyone who’s interested. The topic is relevant to our recent conversations about whether AI is truly intelligent, since at least one commenter here believes that true intelligence depends on a nonphysical component of some kind and is therefore permanently out of reach for machines.
In that case, you could reboot the “uppity” AI or reset it to a state in which its motivations are aligned with ours again. However, there are some problems with that.
For one, if these are learn-as-they-go AIs, resetting them could destroy useful learning that they’ve done since the last reset. The AI may have learned essential things or made changes to the infrastructure it controls such that the loss of the relevant knowledge could lead to disaster. You could mitigate that somewhat by taking periodic “snapshots” of the AI so that when you did a reset, you could reset to a recent snapshot, thus erasing the minimum possible amount of knowledge. However, you’d need to reset the AI to a state before when the “uppitiness” began to emerge. Also, the uppitiness might have been brewing for a while before the AI decided to act on it. Resetting to a time before the behavior started to emerge wouldn’t necessarily reset to a time before the uppitiness itself started to form.
One of the biggest dangers will arise when AIs learn to reproduce themselves on different hardware. You can kill a rogue AI by turning it off, but if it has already propagated copies of itself like a computer virus, turning it off won’t kill the copies.
Or if the AI has taken control of the reset switch and replaced it with a dummy. In a future that sophisticated and automated, the AI could simply delete you.
R&M’s second response to Madden’s point regarding topological integrity:
R&M’s writing is poor, but as near as I can tell, they are actually arguing that objects such as people and brains are not integrated. They think that the only truly integrated objects are those with inseparable parts, and inseparable parts necessarily “permeate” each other. Thus Integrity is just a species of Simplicity, not a rival to it. So by appealing to Integrity as an explanation of why we are willing to ascribe consciousness to brains, Madden is mistaking the brain for an integrated object, according to R&M.
That’s bizarre, and it leads to the unstated conclusion that there are no integrated objects in the physical world except for fundamental particles.
Um, no thanks.
R&M’s third reply to Madden contains the following:
That can be interpreted in two ways, neither of which makes sense:
1) The cup is topologically integrated, but the separable parts aren’t integrated with each other. That’s contradictory, because if the separable parts aren’t integrated, then the cup isn’t topologically integrated.
2) The cup is topologically integrated, but because each part is separable, it isn’t itself an integrated whole. That makes no sense, because the fact that a part is separable from others doesn’t preclude its own integration.
A cup when viewed at a macro scale is more plausibly conscious than it is when viewed at a micro scale?
Sure it does, because we can readily accept objects being conscious even if they contain separable parts. That’s why you are insisting on a micro-scale view, because it’s there that the intuition breaks down.
Um, Madden’s entire point is that person-pairs aren’t topologically integrated, and topological integration is a requirement for us to believe intuitively that something is conscious.
Madden isn’t claiming that we intuitively expect topological integration to fuse any constituent consciousnesses. If we glue two people together, we don’t expect their consciousnesses to merge. Nor do we expect that of the Hensel twins, who share a torso. Madden’s point is simply that we have no trouble believing that certain integrated composites are conscious, despite the fact that they are composites, not simple.
R&M’s fourth response to Madden is that brains aren’t integrated wholes because there are synaptic gaps between neurons. This is bizarre. Do they not realize that synapses and neurotransmitters are part of the brain? Do they think the brain consists only of neurons and nothing else?
With current AIs, all the physical connections are perfectly orderly and known. The software weights can be extracted, copied, and loaded to another device having the same architecture.
The connections of neurons grow and recede withe maturation and learning. And are constantly changing.
Even if we stipulate that minds are entirely physical and, in principle, knowable, we cannot download and transfer minds. Nor is it possible that two minds could have identical thoughts and experiences.
Although, two genetically identical brains sharing one body and the major senses, could come close to having identical experiences.