Why Stanislaw Lem’s Futurism Deserves Attention

In this article, Lee Billings riffs on Stanislaw Lem's relatively unknown book of philosophical essays, Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations), written in 1964 but not fully translated into English until 2013. Lem is known primarily for his science fiction writing, especially the 1961 novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972.

In the Summa, however, Lem meditates on topics that were still fully "fantastic" in 1964, but now are topics of conversation within the realm of the possible, such as virtual reality, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and the technological singularity.

The Book No One Read

Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention

By Lee Billings | October 2, 2014

I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel room after two days covering The Singularity Summit, an annual gathering of scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs discussing the future obsolescence of human beings.
In math, a “singularity” is a function that takes on an infinite value, usually to the detriment of an equation’s sense and sensibility. In physics, the term usually refers to a region of infinite density and infinitely curved space, something thought to exist inside black holes and at the very beginning of the Big Bang. In the rather different parlance of Silicon Valley, “The Singularity” is an inexorably-approaching event in which humans ride an accelerating wave of technological progress to somehow create superior artificial intellects—intellects which with predictable unpredictability then explosively make further disruptive innovations so powerful and profound that our civilization, our species, and perhaps even our entire planet are rapidly transformed into some scarcely imaginable state. Not long after The Singularity’s arrival, argue its proponents, humanity’s dominion over the Earth will come to an end.

I had encountered a wide spectrum of thought in and around the conference. Some attendees overflowed with exuberance, awaiting the arrival of machines of loving grace to watch over them in a paradisiacal post-scarcity utopia, while others, more mindful of history, dreaded the possible demons new technologies could unleash. Even the self-professed skeptics in attendance sensed the world was poised on the cusp of some massive technology-driven transition. A typical conversation at the conference would refer at least once to some exotic concept like whole-brain emulation, cognitive enhancement, artificial life, virtual reality, or molecular nanotechnology, and many carried a cynical sheen of eschatological hucksterism: Climb aboard, don’t delay, invest right now, and you, too, may be among the chosen who rise to power from the ashes of the former world!

Over vegetarian hors d’oeuvres and red wine at a Bay Area villa, I had chatted with the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who planned to adopt an “aggressive” strategy for investing in a “positive” Singularity, which would be “the biggest boom ever,” if it doesn’t first “blow up the whole world.” I had talked with the autodidactic artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky about his fears that artificial minds might, once created, rapidly destroy the planet. At one point, the inventor-turned-proselytizer
 Ray Kurzweil teleconferenced in to discuss,
among other things, his plans for becoming transhuman, transcending his own biology to 
achieve some sort of
 eternal life. Kurzweil
 believes this is possible, 
even probable, provided he can just live to see
 The Singularity’s dawn, 
which he has pegged at 
sometime in the middle of the 21st century. To this end, he reportedly consumes some 150 vitamin supplements a day.

Returning to my motel room exhausted each night, I unwound by reading excerpts from an old book, Summa Technologiae. The late Polish author Stanislaw Lem had written it in the early 1960s, setting himself the lofty goal of forging a secular counterpart to the 13th-century Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas’s landmark compendium exploring the foundations and limits of Christian theology. Where Aquinas argued for the certainty of a Creator, an immortal soul, and eternal salvation as based on scripture, Lem concerned himself with the uncertain future of intelligence and technology throughout the universe, guided by the tenets of modern science.

To paraphrase Lem himself, the book was an investigation of the thorns of technological roses that had yet to bloom. And yet, despite Lem’s later observation that “nothing ages as fast as the future,” to my surprise most of the book’s nearly half-century-old prognostications concerned the very same topics I had encountered during my days at the conference, and felt just as fresh. Most surprising of all, in subsequent conversations I confirmed my suspicions that among the masters of our technological universe gathered there in San Francisco to forge a transhuman future, very few were familiar with the book or, for that matter, with Lem. I felt like a passenger in a car who discovers a blindspot in the central focus of the driver’s view.

Such blindness was, perhaps, understandable. In 2007, only fragments of Summa Technologiae had appeared in English, via partial translations undertaken independently by the literary scholar Peter Swirski and a German software developer named Frank Prengel. These fragments were what I read in the motel. The first complete English translation, by the media researcher Joanna Zylinska, only appeared in 2013. By Lem’s own admission, from the start the book was a commercial and a critical failure that “sank without a trace” upon its first appearance in print. Lem’s terminology and dense, baroque style is partially to blame—many of his finest points were made in digressive parables, allegories, and footnotes, and he coined his own neologisms for what were, at the time, distinctly over-the-horizon fields. In Lem’s lexicon, virtual reality was “phantomatics,” molecular nanotechnology was “molectronics,” cognitive enhancement was “cerebromatics,” and biomimicry and the creation of artificial life was “imitology.” He had even coined a term for search-engine optimization, a la Google: “ariadnology.” The path to advanced artificial intelligence he called the “technoevolution” of “intellectronics.”

Even now, if Lem is known at all to the vast majority of the English-speaking world, it is chiefly for his authorship of Solaris, a popular 1961 science-fiction novel that spawned two critically acclaimed film adaptations, one by Andrei Tarkovsky and another by Steven Soderbergh. Yet to say the prolific author only wrote science fiction would be foolishly dismissive. That so much of his output can be classified as such is because so many of his intellectual wanderings took him to the outer frontiers of knowledge.

Lem was a polymath, a voracious reader who devoured not only the classic literary canon, but also a plethora of research journals, scientific periodicals, and popular books by leading researchers. His genius was in standing on the shoulders of scientific giants to distill the essence of their work, flavored with bittersweet insights and thought experiments that linked their mathematical abstractions to deep existential mysteries and the nature of the human condition. For this reason alone, reading Lem is an education, wherein one may learn the deep ramifications of breakthroughs such as Claude Shannon’s development of information theory, Alan Turing’s work on computation, and John von Neumann’s exploration of game theory. Much of his best work entailed constructing analyses based on logic with which anyone would agree, then showing how these eminently reasonable premises lead to astonishing conclusions. And the fundamental urtext for all of it, the wellspring from which the remainder of his output flowed, is Summa Technologiae.

The core of the book is a heady mix of evolutionary biology, thermodynamics—the study of energy flowing through a system—and cybernetics, a diffuse field pioneered in the 1940s by Norbert Wiener studying how feedback loops can automatically regulate the behavior of machines and organisms. Considering a planetary civilization this way, Lem posits a set of feedbacks between the stability of a society and its degree of technological development. In its early stages, Lem writes, the development of technology is a self-reinforcing process that promotes homeostasis, the ability to maintain stability in the face of continual change and increasing disorder. That is, incremental advances in technology tend to progressively increase a society’s resilience against disruptive environmental forces such as pandemics, famines, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. More advances lead to more protection, which promotes more advances still.

And yet, Lem argues, that same technology-driven positive feedback loop is also an Achilles heel for planetary civilizations, at least for ours here on Earth…

The full article appears in the Fall 2014 Nautilus Quarterly. Subscribe today!

Freelance writer Lee Billings is the author of Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars.

Photograph by Forum/UIG/Getty Images

 

Nick Bostrom is the author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (September, 2014). Bostrom is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. He is the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, a multidisciplinary research center which enables a few exceptional mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists to think carefully about global priorities and big questions for humanity.

Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), and Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and the groundbreaking Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014). He is best known for his work in five areas: (i) existential risk; (ii) the simulation argument; (iii) anthropics (developing the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects); (iv) impacts of future technology; and (v) implications of consequentialism for global strategy.

He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences). Earlier this year he was included on Prospect magazine's World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. His writings have been translated into 22 languages. There have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works.

For more, see www.nickbostrom.com

This is an excellent talk.

Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence - Authors@Google

Published on Sept 22, 2014


Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

This profoundly ambitious and original book breaks down a vast track of difficult intellectual terrain. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom's work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.

This talk was hosted by Boris Debic.

A Thousand Cooperative, Self-Organising Robots - This Is How the End of Human Dominance on Earth Will Occur

I suspect I am not the only one who finds a swarm of cooperative, self-organizing robots to be a rather obvious foreshadowing of the end of human dominance on Earth. Welcome to the singularity.

This is an excellent review of the new study published in Science (pay-walled, of course). It comes from National Geographic's Phenomena blog, of which Not Exactly Rocket Science is a part.

A Swarm of a Thousand Cooperative, Self-Organising Robots

by Ed Yong | Not Exactly Rocket Science
August 14, 2014

In a lab at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the world’s largest swarm of cooperative robots is building a star… out of themselves. There are 1024 of these inch-wide ‘Kilobots’, and they can arrange themselves into different shapes, from a letter to a wrench. They are slow and comically jerky in their movements, but they are also autonomous. Once they’re given a shape, they can recreate it without any further instructions, simply by cooperating with their neighbours and organising themselves.

The Kilobots are the work of Mike Rubenstein, Alejandro Cornejo and Radhika Nagpal, who were inspired by natural swarms, where simple and limited units can cooperate to do great things. Thousands of fire ants can unite into living bridges, rafts and buildings. Billions of unthinking neurons can create the human brain. Trillions of cells can fashion a tree or a tyrannosaur. Scientists have tried to make artificial swarms with similar abilities, but building and programming them is expensive and difficult. Most of these robot herds consist of a few dozen units, and only a few include more than a hundred. The Kilobots smash that record.

They’re still a far cry from the combiner robots of my childhood cartoons: they’re arrange themselves into two-dimensional shapes rather than assembling Voltron-style into actual objects. But they’re already an impressive achievement. “This is not only the largest swarm of robots in the world but also an excellent test bed, allowing us to validate collective algorithms in practice,” says Roderich Gross from the University of Sheffield, who has bought 900 of the robots himself to use in his own experiments.

“This is a staggering work,” adds Iain Couzin, who studies collective animal behaviour at Princeton University. “It offers a vision of the future where robot groups could form structures on demand as, for example, in search-and-rescue in dangerous environments, or even the formation of miniature swarms within the body to detect and treat disease.”

“And I’ll form… the wrench!” Credit: Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University.

To create their legion, the team had to rethink every aspect of a typical robot. “If you have a power switch, it takes four seconds to push that, so it’ll take over an hour to turn on a thousand robots,” says Rubenstein. “Charging them, turning them on, sending them new instructions… everything you do with a thousand robots has to be at the level of all the robots at once.”

They also have to be cheap. Fancy parts might make each bot more powerful, but would turn a swarm into a budget-breaker. Even wheels were out. Instead, the team used simpler vibration motors. If you leave your phone on a table and it vibrates, it will also slide slightly: that’s how the Kilobots move. They have two motors: if either vibrates individually, the robot rotates; if both vibrate, it goes straight.

Well, straight-ish, anyway. The tyranny of cost-efficiency meant that the team had to lose any sensors that might tell the robots their bearings or positions. They can’t tell where they are, or if they’re going straight. But each one can shoot infrared beams to the surface below it, and sense the beams reflecting from its neighbours. By measuring how bright the reflections are, it can calculate its distance from other Kilobots.

This combination of stilted motion and dulled senses meant that each robot costs just $20. It also meant that “the robots were even more limited than we expected,” says Rubenstein. “The way they sense distance is noisy and imprecise. You can tell them to move and they won’t, and they’ll have no idea that they’re not moving.”

Fortunately, they have each other. A stuck Kilobot can’t tell if it’s stuck on its own, but it can communicate with its neighbours. If it thinks it’s moving but the distances from its neighbours change, it can deduce that something is wrong. And if neighbours estimate the distances between them and use the average, they can smooth out individual errors.

Using these principles, the team created a simple program that allows the robots to independently assemble into different shapes using just three behaviours. First, they move by skirting along the edges of a group. Second, they create gradients as a crude way of noting their position in the swarm. (A nominated source robot gets a gradient value of 0. Any adjacent robot that can see it sets its gradient value to 1. Any robot that sees 1 but not 0 sets its gradient to 2, and so on.) Finally, although they have no GPS, they can triangulate their position by talking to their neighbours. As long as the team nominates some robots as seeds, effectively turning them into the zero-point on a invisible graph, the rest of the swarm can then work out where they are.

Every Kilobot runs on the same program. The team only has to give them a shape and nominate four of them as seeds. Once that’s done, the rest slowly pour into the right pattern, in an endearingly life-like way. It takes them around 12 hours, but they do it all without any human intervention. And although the final shapes are always a little warped, that’s life-like too. Fire ants don’t have a Platonic ideal of what a bridge or raft should look like; they just work with their neighbours to get the job done.

Stills from movies showing the Kilobots assembling into a K and a star. 

Credit: Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University.

Scientists have long been able to simulate huge swarms of life-like virtual particles in computers, using very simple rules. But the real world is full of pesky physics, inconvenient noise, and temperamental circuitry. Stuff goes wrong. By building an actual swarm, the team can address these problems and make their programs more robust. They’ve already had to deal with a litany of failed motors, stalled robots, collisions, and traffic jams. “The more times you run it, the more likely some random thing will show up that you don’t expect,” says Rubenstein. “That’s the problem with 1,000 robots: even rare things can happen very frequently.”

The next step will be to build robots that actually self-assemble by attaching to each other, says Marco Dorigo from the Free University of Brussels.. “We did so with tens of robots,” he says. “It will not be easy with one thousand.” Rubenstein agrees: “Physical connection is always difficult. If you have a dock, you tend to design the rest of the robot around that dock. It has a huge impact.”

Eventually, he also wants to get to a position where the robots can sense their environment and react accordingly, rather than just slide into some pre-determined shape. Like fire ants, when they get to a body of water, they wouldn’t have to be fed the image of a bridge; they would just self-assemble into one. “That’s a whole other level of intelligence, and it’s not really understood how to do that in robotics,” says Rubenstein. “But nature does it well.”


Reference:
Rubenstein, Cornejo, and Nagpal. (2014, Aug 15). Programmable self-assembly in a thousand-robot swarm. Science; 345(6198):795-799.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1254295

More on robots:

• Robots in disguise: soft-bodied walking machine can camouflage itself
• Robots evolve to deceive one another
• Cockroaches and geckos disappear by swinging under ledges… and inspire robots
• Enter the nano-spiders – independent walking robots made of DNA
• A Bird-Like Flock of Autonomous Drones
• Robo-starfish learns about itself and adapts to injuries

Who's Afraid of Robots? [UPDATED]

 

Once again, from Bookforum's Omnivore blog, here is a cool collection of links on all things robotic, from killer robots to ethical robots (U.S. military!). Oh, and it seems you would probably f**k a robot, according to Gawker. I don't know, it would at least have to buy me dinner and get me drunk....

UPDATE: This morning Aeon Magazine posted an interesting and highly related article on its site, "Sexbot slaves: Thanks to new technology, sex toys are becoming tools for connection - but will sexbots reverse that trend?" by Leah Reich. Here is a little of the article:

‘Right now, we’re at an inflection point on the meaning of sexbot,’ says Kyle Machulis, the California-based world expert on sex technology. ‘Tracing the history of the term will lead you to a fork: robots for sex (idealised version: Jude Law in the movie AI), and people that fetishise being robots (clockworks, etc). There was a crossover of these in the days of alt.sex.fetish.robots, but I see less and less people fetishising the media/aesthetics, and more talking about actually having sex with robots.’

Strange times we live in, eh?

Who's afraid of robots?

Jun 4 2014
9:00AM

• Ezio Di Nucci (Duisburg-Essen) and Filippo Santoni de Sio (TUDelft): Who’s Afraid of Robots? 
• Fear of Automation and the Ideal of Direct Control. David Gunkel (NIU): The Rights of Machines: Caring for Robotic Care Givers. 
• Cameron Hamilton (Georgia State): On the Possibility of Robots Having Emotions. 
• From the inaugural issue of Intervalla, a special section on social robots and emotion: Transcending the boundary between humans and ICTs. 
• “How do robots have sex?” sounds like the set-up line for a bad joke; using robots to model an evolutionary conundrum. 
• Would you fuck a robot? You would probably fuck a robot. 
• Something any man can be proud of: The humble sperm has inspired a new robot, the MagnetoSperm — or “bro-bot”. 
• Ryan Jacobs on how the elderly fear their future robot friends will corrupt children. 
• From the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, a collective review of the books Aristotle's Laptop: The Discovery of Our Informational Mind by Igor Aleksander and Helen Morton and Consciousness and Robot Sentience by Pentti O. Haikonen. 
• Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering Ray Kurzweil thinks so. 
• US military begins research into moral, ethical robots, to stave off Skynet-like apocalypse. 
• Who’s afraid of killer robots (and why)? 
• Cory Doctorow on why it is not possible to regulate robots: We regulate machines, from drills to defibrillators, but what distinguishes a power-drill from a robot-drill? 
• Researchers have invented insect-sized robots that can swarm together and build just about anything. 
• Evan Selinger on how the emerging “Internet of Things” is turning us into robots. 
• Forget robots — we’ll soon be fusing technology with living matter. 
• Researchers put robots in conversation, and the result is somewhere between romantic bickering and dorm-room existentialism.

Recently, I shared an article from George Dvorsky called "You Might Never Upload Your Brain Into a Computer," in which he outlined a series of reasons for his position:

1. Brain functions are not computable
2. We’ll never solve the hard problem of consciousness
3. We’ll never solve the binding problem
4. Panpsychism is true
5. Mind-body dualism is true
6. It would be unethical to develop
7. We can never be sure it works
8. Uploaded minds would be vulnerable to hacking and abuse

While I disagree with at least two of his points (I am not convinced panpsychism is true and I am VERY skeptical of mind-body dualism), I applaud the principle of it.

Likewise, this recent post from John Grohol at Psych Central's World of Psychology calls out futurist Ray Kurzweil on his claims around computer sentience, i.e., the singularity.

Why Ray Kurzweil is Wrong: Computers Won’t Be Smarter Than Us Anytime Soon

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.



“When Kurzweil first started talking about the “singularity”, a conceit he borrowed from the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, he was dismissed as a fantasist. He has been saying for years that he believes that the Turing test – the moment at which a computer will exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human – will be passed in 2029.”

Sorry, but Ray Kurzweil is wrong. It’s easy to understand why computers are nowhere near close to surpassing humans… And here’s why.

Intelligence is one thing. But it’s probably the pinnacle of human narcissism to believe that we could design machines to understand us long before we even understood ourselves. Shakespeare, after all, said, “Know thyself.”

Yet, here it is squarely in 2014, and we still have only an inkling of how the human brain works. The very font of out intelligence and existence is contained in the brain — a simple human organ like the heart. Yet we don’t know how it works. All we have are theories.

Let me reiterate this: We don’t know how the human brain works.

How can anyone in their right mind say that, after a century of study into how the brain operates, we’re suddenly going to crack the code in the next 15 years?

And crack the code one must. Without understanding how the brain works, it’s ludicrous to say we could design a machine to replicate the brain’s near-instantaneous processing of hundreds of different sensory inputs from dozens of trajectories. That would be akin to saying we could design a space craft to travel to the moon, before designing — and understanding how to design — the computers that would take the craft there.

It’s a little backwards to think you could create a machine to replicate the human mind before you understand the basics of how the human mind makes so many connections, so easily.

Human intelligence, as any psychologist can tell you, is a complicated, complex thing. The standard tests for intelligence aren’t just paper-and-pencil knowledge quizzes. They involve the manipulation of objects in three-dimensional spaces (something most computers can’t do at all), understanding how objects fit within a larger system of objects, and other tests like this. It’s not just good vocabulary that makes a person smart. It’s a combination of skills, thought, knowledge, experience and visual-spatial skills. Most of which even the smartest computer today only has a rudimentary grasp of (especially without the help of human-created GPS systems).

Robots and computers are nowhere close to humanity in approaching its intelligence. They are probably around an ant in terms of their proximity today to “outsmarting” their makers. A driving car that relies on other computer systems — again, created by humans — is hardly an example of computer-based, innate intelligence. A computer than can answer trivia in a game show or play a game of chess isn’t really equivalent to the knowledge that even the most rudimentary blue-collar job holder holds. It’s a sideshow act. A distraction meant to demonstrate the very limited, singular focus computers have historically excelled at.

The fact that anyone even needs to point out that single-purpose computers are only good at the singular task they’ve been designed to do is ridiculous. A Google-driven car can’t beat a Jeopardy player. And the Jeopardy computer that won can’t tell you a thing about tomorrow’s weather forecast. Or how to solve a chess problem. Or what’s the best way to retrieve a failed space mission. Or when’s the best time to plant crops in the Mississippi delta. Or even the ability to turn a knob in the right direction in order to ensure the water turns off.

If you can design a computer to pretend to be a human in a very artificial, lab-created task of answering random dumb questions from a human — that’s not a computer that’s “smarter” than us. That’s a computer that’s incredibly dumb, yet was able to fool a stupid panel of judges judging from a criteria that’s all but disconnected from the real world.

And so that’s the primary reason Ray Kurzweil is wrong — we will not have any kind of sentient intelligence — in computers, robots, or anything else — in a mere 15 years. Until we understand the foundation of our own minds, it’s narcissistic (and a little bit naive) to believe we could design an artificial one that could function just as well as our own.

We are in the 1800s in terms of our understanding of our minds, and until we reach the 21st century, computers too will be in the 1800s of their ability to become sentient.


Read more:
Why robots will not be smarter than humans by 2029 in reply to 2029: the year when robots will have the power to outsmart their makers

George Dvorsky - You Might Never Upload Your Brain Into a Computer

I think we need to drop the "might" from that headline and replace it with "will." Still, George Dvorsky gets a big AMEN from me on this piece from io9 (even if it is a year old).

For the record, however, I feel compelled to lodge my disagreement with point #5, that "mind-body dualism" is true. Nonsense. There is actually a logical fallacy at work here - if dualism were true, our minds would not be "located somewhere outside our bodies — like in a vat somewhere, or oddly enough, in a simulation (a la The Matrix)," they would reside in the body but separate from it. This is exactly the premise necessary to believe our minds can be uploaded into a computer.

Even if we believe that the mind is simply a by-product of brain activity, there is no way to transfer a wet biological system built from fat, proteins, neurotransmitters, and electrical current into a dry computer mainframe. I don't see this EVER being an option.

You Might Never Upload Your Brain Into a Computer

George Dvorsky
Debunkery | 4/17/13


Many futurists predict that one day we'll upload our minds into computers, where we'll romp around in virtual reality environments. That's possible — but there are still a number of thorny issues to consider. Here are eight reasons why your brain may never be digitized.

Indeed, this isn’t just idle speculation. Many important thinkers have expressed their support of the possibility, including the renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of How to Create a Mind), roboticist Hans Moravec, cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, neuroscientist David Eagleman, and many others.

Skeptics, of course, relish the opportunity to debunk uploads. The claim that we’ll be able to transfer our conscious thoughts to a computer, after all, is a rather extraordinary one.

But many of the standard counter-arguments tend to fall short. Typical complaints cite insufficient processing power, inadequate storage space, or the fear that the supercomputers will be slow, unstable and prone to catastrophic failures — concerns that certainly don’t appear intractable given the onslaught of Moore’s Law and the potential for megascale computation. Another popular objection is that the mind cannot exist without a body. But an uploaded mind could be endowed with a simulated body and placed in a simulated world.

To be fair, however, there are a number of genuine scientific, philosophical, ethical, and even security concerns that could significantly limit or even prevent consciousness uploads from ever happening. Here are eight of the most serious.

1. Brain functions are not computable

Proponents of mind uploading tend to argue that the brain is a Turing Machine — the idea that organic minds are nothing more than classical information-processors. It’s an assumption derived from the strong physical Church-Turing thesis, and one that now drives much of cognitive science.

But not everyone believes the brain/computer analogy works. Speaking recently at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis said that, “The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it.” He referred to the idea of uploads as “bunk,” saying that it’ll never happen and that “[t]here are a lot of people selling the idea that you can mimic the brain with a computer.” Nicolelis argues that human consciousness can’t be replicated in silicon because most of its important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells.

“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he said. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.” Image credit: Jeff Cameron Collingwood/Shutterstock.

2. We’ll never solve the hard problem of consciousness

The computability of the brain aside, we may never be able to explain how and why we have qualia, or what’s called phenomenal experience.

According to David Chalmers — the philosopher of mind who came up with the term “hard problem” — we’ll likely solve the easy problems of human cognition, like how we focus our attention, recall a memory, discriminate, and process information. But explaining how incoming sensations get translated into subjective feelings — like the experience of color, taste, or the pleasurable sound of music — is proving to be much more difficult. Moreover, we’re still not entirely sure why we even have consciousness, and why we’re not just “philosophical zombies” — hypothetical beings who act and respond as if they’re conscious, but have no internal mental states.

In his paper, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Chalmers writes:

How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, argues Chalmers, it is this one. Image: blog.lib.umn.edu.

3. We’ll never solve the binding problem

And even if we do figure out how the brain generates subjective experience, classical digital computers may never be able to support unitary phenomenal minds. This is what’s referred to as the binding problem — our inability to understand how a mind is able to segregate elements and combine problems as seamlessly as it does. Needless to say, we don’t even know if a Turing Machine can even support these functions.

More specifically, we still need to figure out how our brains segregate elements in complex patterns, a process that allows us to distinguish them as discrete objects. The binding problem also describes the issue of how objects, like those in the background or in our peripheral experience — or even something as abstract as emotions — can still be combined into a unitary and coherent experience. As the cognitive neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo has said, “Binding is thus seen as a problem of finding the mechanisms which map the ‘objective’ physical entities in the external world into corresponding internal neural entities in the brain.”

He continues:

Once the idea of consciousness-related binding is formulated, it becomes immediately clear that it is closely associated with two central problems in consciousness research. The first concerns the unity of phenomenal consciousness. The contents of phenomenal consciousness are unified into one coherent whole, containing a unified ‘‘me’’ in the center of one unified perceptual world, full of coherent objects. How should we describe and explain such experiential unity? The second problem of relevance here concerns the neural correlates of consciousness. If we are looking for an explanation to the unity of consciousness by postulating underlying neural mechanisms, these neural mechanisms surely qualify for being direct neural correlates of unified phenomenal states.

No one knows how our organic brains perform this trick — at least not yet — or if digital computers will ever be capable of phenomenal binding. Image credit: agsandrew/Shutterstock.

4. Panpsychism is true

Though still controversial, there’s also the potential for panpsychism to be in effect. This is the notion that consciousness is a fundamental and irreducible feature of the cosmos. It might sound a bit New Agey, but it’s an idea that’s steadily gaining currency (especially in consideration of our inability to solve the Hard Problem).

Panpsychists speculate that all parts of matter involve mind. Neuroscientist Stuart Hameroff has suggested that consciousness is related to a fundamental component of physical reality — components that are akin to phenomenon like mass, spin or charge. According to this view, the basis of consciousness can be found in an additional fundamental force of nature not unlike gravity or electromagnetism. This would be something like an elementary sentience or awareness. As Hameroff notes, "these components just are." Likewise, David Chalmers has proposed a double-aspect theory in which information has both physical and experiential aspects. Panpsychism has also attracted the attention of quantum physicists (who speculate about potential quantum aspects of consciousness given our presence in an Everett Universe), and physicalists like Galen Strawson (who argues that mental/experiential is physical).

Why this presents a problem to mind uploading is that consciousness may not substrate neutral — a central tenant of the Church-Turing Hypothesis — but is in fact dependent on specific physical/material configurations. It’s quite possible that there’s no digital or algorithmic equivalent to consciousness. Having consciousness arise in a classical Von Neumann architecture, therefore, may be as impossible as splitting an atom in a virtual environment by using ones and zeros. Image credit: agsandrew/Shutterstock.

5. Mind-body dualism is true

Perhaps even more controversial is the suggestion that consciousness lies somewhere outside the brain, perhaps as some ethereal soul or spirit. It’s an idea that’s primarily associated with Rene Descartes, the 17th century philosopher who speculated that the mind is a nonphysical substance (as opposed to physicalist interpretations of mind and consciousness). Consequently, some proponents of dualism (or even vitalism) suggest that consciousness lies outside knowable science.

Needless to say, if our minds are located somewhere outside our bodies — like in a vat somewhere, or oddly enough, in a simulation (a la The Matrix) — our chances of uploading ourselves are slim to none.

6. It would be unethical to develop

Philosophical and scientific concerns aside, there may also be some moral reasons to forego the project. If we’re going to develop upload technologies, we’re going to have to conduct some rather invasive experiments, both on animals and humans. The potential for abuse is significant.

Uploading schemas typically describe the scanning and mapping of an individual’s brain, or serial sectioning. While a test subject, like a mouse or monkey, could be placed under a general anesthetic, it will eventually have to be re-animated in digital substrate. Once this happens, we’ll likely have no conception of its internal, subjective experience. It’s brain could be completely mangled, resulting terrible psychological or physical anguish. It’s reasonable to assume that our early uploading efforts will be far from perfect, and potentially cruel.

And when it comes time for the first human to be uploaded, there could be serious ethical and legal issues to consider — especially considering that we’re talking about the re-location of a living, rights-bearing human being. Image credit: K. Zhuang.

7. We can never be sure it works

Which leads to the next point, that of post-upload skepticism. A person can never really be sure they created a sentient copy of themselves. This is the continuity of consciousness problem — the uncertainty we’ll have that, instead of moving our minds, we simply copied ourselves instead.

Because we can’t measure for consciousness — either qualitatively or quantitatively — uploading will require a tremendous leap of faith — a leap that could lead to complete oblivion (e.g. a philosophical zombie), or something completely unexpected. And relying on the advice from uploaded beings won’t help either (“Come on in, the water’s fine...”).

In an email to me, philosopher David Pearce put it this way:

Think of it like a game of chess. If I tell you the moves, you can faithfully replicate the gameplay. But you know nothing whatsoever of the textures of the pieces, or indeed, whether they have any textures at all (perhaps I played online). Likewise, I think, the same can be said with the textures of consciousness. The possibility of substrate-independent minds needs to be distinguished from the possibility of substrate-independent qualia.

In other words, the quality of conscious experience in digital substrate could be far removed from that experienced by an analog consciousness. Image: Rikomatic.

8. Uploaded minds would be vulnerable to hacking and abuse

Once our minds are uploaded, they’ll be physically and inextricably connected to the larger computational superstructure. By consequence, uploaded brains will be perpetually vulnerable to malicious attacks and other unwanted intrusions.

To avoid this, each uploaded person will have to set-up a personal firewall to prevent themselves from being re-programmed, spied upon, damaged, exploited, deleted, or copied against their will. These threats could come from other uploads, rogue AI, malicious scripts, or even the authorities in power (e.g. as a means to instill order and control).

Indeed, as we know all too well today, even the tightest security measures can't prevent the most sophisticated attacks; an uploaded mind can never be sure it’s safe.

• Special thanks to David Pearce for helping with this article.
• Top image: Jurgen Ziewe/Shutterstock.

Jason Silva - The Omega Point

I'm not a huge fan of teleological systems in general, even though I really mostly agree with Thomas Nagel in his recent book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong. So this new piece at Metanexus from Jason Silva, one of their editors, brings up a lot of questions for me.

The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined the term, omega point, to describe "a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving."

In this theory, developed by Teilhard in The Future of Man (1950), the universe is constantly developing towards higher levels of material complexity and consciousness, a theory of evolution that Teilhard called the Law of Complexity/Consciousness. For Teilhard, the universe can only move in the direction of more complexity and consciousness if it is being drawn by a supreme point of complexity and consciousness.

Further, Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man argues that the Omega Point must possess the following five attributes:

• Already existing

• Only thus can the rise of the universe towards higher stages of consciousness be explained

• Personal – an intellectual being and not an abstract idea

• The increasing complexity of matter has not only led to higher forms of consciousness, but accordingly to more personalization, of which human beings are the highest attained form in the known universe. They are completely individualized, free centers of operation. It is in this way that man is said [1] to be made in the image of God, who is the highest form of personality. Teilhard expressly stated that in the Omega Point, when the universe becomes One, human persons will not be suppressed, but super-personalized. Personality will be infinitely enriched. This is because the Omega Point unites creation, and the more it unites, the increasing complexity of the universe aids in higher levels of consciousness. Thus, as God creates, the universe evolves towards higher forms of complexity, consciousness, and finally with humans, personality, because God, who is drawing the universe towards Him, is a person.

• Transcendent

• The Omega Point cannot be the result of the universe's final complex stage of itself's own consciousness. Instead, the Omega Point must exist even before the universe's evolution, because the Omega Point is responsible for the rise of the universe towards more complexity, consciousness and personality. Which essentially means that the Omega Point is outside the framework in which the universe rises, because it is by the attraction of the Omega Point that the universe evolves towards Him.

• Autonomous

• That is, free from the limitations of space (nonlocality) and time (atemporality).

• Irreversible

• That is attainable and imperative; it must happen and cannot be undone.

The omega point is an idea central to Ken Wilber's Integral Theory, which is one of my issues with his model - there is an inherent assumption that this is true, without any serious evidence in support. I would guess that there is also a considerable degree of devolution and simplification occurring in the universe right now.

In fact, at the current rate of expansion in the universe, there will be fewer and fewer stars, galaxies, and other cosmic structures visible in the night sky (granted, this is on a long-term scale of millions and billions of years). If the universe is conscious, as this theory assumes, then such diffusion of matter into the vast emptiness of space would seem to lead to less complexity, not more, and to reduced consciousness, not greater.

Even more troubling to me is the assumption that there is a god of some sort who serves as the model of human aspirations.

Yet I share these things here because beneath my rationalism, there is a romantic idealist who wishes these fantasies were true. This brief article and accompanying video come from Metanexus Blog: Big Ideas.

The Omega Point

Jason Silva
July 29, 2013

The Omega Point is a term coined by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It describes a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving.

The concept is closely linked to Ray Kurzweill's notion of the Singularity, as well as the theories of a number of other futurists, techno-utopics, and "psychonauts." All these theories represent a highly-optimistic stance on the exponential increase of complexity in life, technology, and the universe.

In Jason Silva's latest short video, he explores the common thread running through these theories and perhaps also the universe and you.