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Will Uploaded Minds in Machines be Alive?
Mindclones—consciousness in post-biological media—will feel as full of life as we biological creatures.
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COMMENTS
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 12/26 at 03:17 PM
Another really excellent article of Martine. I don't see a conflict between vitology and biology. Rather, I see biology as a special case, based on carbon chemistry, of the more general realm of vitology.
Posted by mjgeddes on 12/27 at 02:11 AM
As I mentioned on Hanson's blog, the growing power of publically available web-apps is actually quite amazing, and thousands and thousands of hackers are utilizing them.
Examples:
http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=decision+theory&t=all&sort=0&g=s
Instantly summoned nearly 3 million scientific items on 'decision theory' from the worlds most powerful scientific search engine 'Sircus', including latest state-of-the-art papers.
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http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=normal+distribution,+mean=0,+sd=2
Instantly produced specified normal probability distribution using 'Wolfram Alpha'
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=derivative+of+x^4+sin+x
Instantly produced derivates of specified math function, including all steps of working and graphs using 'Wolfram Alpha'
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Did you know there are now web apps that actually partially write science papers automatically, trawling the net for information and converting to pdf form?
And that's just today, more and more powerful applications are appearing at an ever increasing rate.
Posted by veronica on 12/27 at 08:07 AM
I believe I can rank the following four men's criteria for life from the least restrictive to the most restrictive.
1."I think computer viruses should count as life. "
-- Hawking
2. "Machines are honorary living things."
-- Richard Dawkins, Oxford University
3. "A frozen embryo is neither alive nor dead,
but rather in a third, entirely different state."
-- Lee Silver, Princeton University biologist
4. "We define life to be self-reproduction with
error correction. Note that a single human
being does not satisfy this sufficient
condition [but] a male-female pair would'
-- John Barrow, Cambridge University
mathematician, and Frank Tipler, Tulane
University mathematician (1986:215).
Ranking these in terms of ludicrousness is another matter.
Posted by Kevin Parcell on 12/27 at 04:11 PM
Sweet pea, the hole in your wonderful argument is the artificial division between the organism that replicates and the facilitating environment. Any Rube Goldberg contraption might qualify as independently alive with that distinction when the environment is oh-so-convenient. Lamarckism depends on that artificial distinction because it assumes culture is an aspect of environment -- as above so below: we distinguish code from soma, egg from chicken.... Drop the distinction, and we have mind without life, or, more correctly, mind without membrane because these definitions are tautological. But can we see life? Can we? No. The emperor has no clothes. All there is is mind.
Posted by Martine Rothblatt on 12/27 at 04:59 PM
Giulio -- Yes, you got the point precisely. Biology is a special case of vitology. Nucleic acid - based codes are but one, albeit very effective, kind of self-replicating darwinian code.
mjgeddes -- Your links have upregulated my own thinking about how quickly decentralized hacking can produce synthetic intelligence. Thanks for the heightened awareness.
veronica -- Great contribution. You inspire me to a least ludicrous nod to Donna Haraway -- Reciprocal inductions, the socially matrixed infoldings and codings that shape who and what we are, also defines what is life, and what is not.
Posted by mjgeddes on 12/28 at 11:31 AM
You can download your own robot scientist web-app ('Eureqa') - Windows app can import any numerical data into a spread sheet then perform regression (find equations fitting that data).
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/download-robot-scientist/
http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/eureqa
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The very interesting thing is that it actually exposes the limitations of Bayesian inference. It's *perfect* at regression, in that it *perfectly* predicts results for any data set. It's exactly what a perfect Bayesian reasoner is. Guess what: it's very limited, and here's why:
"An ongoing challenge is the tendency of Eureqa to return equations that fit data, but refer to variables that are not yet understood. Lipson likened this to what would happen if time-traveling scientists presented the laws of energy conservation to medieval mathematicians.
"Algebra was known. You could plug in the variable, and it would work. But the concept of energy wasn't there. They didn't have the vocabulary to understand it," he said. "We've seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It's predictive, it's elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means."
In other words, without Categorization, mere Prediction doesn't help you much.
Posted by Martine Rothblatt on 12/28 at 12:29 PM
Kevin -- great observation, trenchant insight. Yet another way that mind *is* deeper than matter. Or perhaps, just mind matters.
You also motivated me to edit my text to make the point that life is more of a conclusion that "here is an environment in which Darwinian codes exist", than a description of what occurs in the environment. In other words, it really is all about the environment. Hence life can be as limited as the right Rube Goldberg device in a customized environment, or as free-wheeling as biology, or perhaps something off to the side, like vitology.
Maybe life is just the study of the subset of environmental parasites that replicate according to darwinian rules.
Posted by CygnusX1 on 12/28 at 04:51 PM
Martine,
I agree that non-biological self-replicating phenomena may be loosely defined as artificial life, or at least as having the same qualities and thus respected as such. And you omitted computer-generated fractals, beautiful and if not confined would expand to fill the entire cosmos? Is a fractal, is a computer virus or a future mindclone conscious? Well I would say, yes it is, maybe? Are these phenomena aware of the restraints of their rules and subsets for replication? If they are then this may be termed as "conscious"?
Are atomic particles conscious, is a proton or an electron a conscious thing? Can any phenomena which interacts and which is affected or reacts to its "Eco-environment" be termed as conscious? Maybe it can, if you contemplate to include the physics and quantum mechanical maths, (and all the maths we can't equate in bases binary, decimal and Hex), as the real arbiter or agent at work. And what is this maths? What are these cosmological organisations and manifestations, this potential?
The real philosophical question is not "what is life", or "what am I?" the question is "who am I?"
Thus separates and distinguishes the perceptive machine or "conscious thing", (the brain, the bio-coding), from the contemplation's of the "self-conscious thing", (the mind), the "I-consciousness" that is as magnificent as the biological coding and the math. But its not all simply about maths is it? If possibilities and diversity are real, it is because of the grace of potential : the potential for all things and for all possibilities, ideas, and the encompassing of all these possibilities as an ultimate unified theory of potential. (aka Brahman).
As far as man is concerned we appear to be stuck in an evolutionary rut? Like the Elephant or Tiger, can we survive the future if we cannot evolve, spiritually? By spiritually I really mean ethically to embrace a connectedness and a separation of mind, (or consciousness) from the biological body to overcome duality and the chains that bind us.
In fact we may have also been responsible for holding back any positive evolutionary biological mutation with too much reliance upon technology, (for example reliance upon diet and clothing has made us weak mammals, albeit intellectual). Are we any more intelligent now than the ancient Greeks? Are our brains bigger? Perhaps humans do not have much of a future, and maybe self-replicating software and AI and AGI is our only legacy?
Posted by Kees van Zon on 12/28 at 08:58 PM
An intriguing topic and an enjoyable article! I find several statements disputable though, including the following.
i) "somas are math's way of making new self-replicating codes". Math, as a human philosophy, cannot make anything; it is a consequence rather than the cause of life. Life, at least that of the organic kind, can manage just fine without math.
ii) "Mindclones are alive". There is no case made for such clones participating in / being subjected to Darwinian evolution, which is suggested as the prime definition of life ("Life is anything that creates order in a compatible environment pursuant to a Darwinian code.") A given mind clone may well evolve in its IT environment, even so drastically so that is ceases to resemble the mind that it was originally a copy of and thereby ceases to be a clone. Individual mind clones may also evolve in quite different ways, to the extent that the difference between "clones" could be bigger than their commonality, so it would be hard to speak of a living 'species'. The case for another aspect of the stated definition of life, self-replication, is also not made for mind clones.
Posted by Scott Draves on 01/04 at 03:03 PM
I think it helps not to think of life as a binary property, but a continuous variable like brightness. The question then is "can it be objectively measured"? The exact definition is profoundly important -- coming up with new names for of not so much.
See this Cyborg mind consisting of 60000 computers and people: www.electricsheep.org Alife in action.
Posted by Martine Rothblatt on 01/04 at 06:03 PM
Scott -- Thanks for incredible link -- I was unaware, and am really impressed. I agree with you that we must think of life, and consciousness, as a continuous variable rather than some arbitrary bright line divide. And how very untrue would that binary approach be anyway to life's evolution! I'm confident objective scalar measurements will arise.
Kees -- I will take up the fair and far-reaching observation of your second paragraph in a subsequent blog posting. You are right that the case was not made well enough in the last post. And thanks for helping to clarify that I did not intend to anthropomorphize math, only to say that codes which through happenstance self-replicate, regardless of the code's substrate, can rapidly become prevalent in a physical niche.
Cygnus X1 -- Your posting really excited me. I'm reading now the book 'You am I,' by Dan Kulak, which embraces your thesis, surrounds it very well philosophically, and draws much inspiration from Dyson, Schrodinger and Parfit. Thanks for laying out Mind as such a unifying force.
Posted by Bill.Barnhill on 01/04 at 06:12 PM
Interesting article. Reminds me of a very good sci-fi book by Charles Stross a few years ago, Accelerando.
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