My Silly Skepticism About AI and Uploading

The following is edited and adapted from the Moot to this post, an exchange with "Gareth Nelson" (his contributions are italicized, follow the link for the unedited version and context) very much like countless exchanges I have had with cocksure robocultic AI-deadenders over the past few decades, but what the hell, new readers may not be bored unto death at such re-hashes as I am. By all means follow the link and make your own contributions, if you like.

Dale -- you've said (and I love this quote of yours) "a picture of you is not you", which is entirely true and I do not claim it is at all possible to "transfer" conciousness from a brain into a computer. But if we stick with the picture analogy, I would argue that a copy of a picture is still as useful for the same purposes. When we look at a beautiful work of art, we derive pleasure from appreciating the skill of the artist... assuming the copy is of high quality we can use it for the same purposes -- appreciating the beauty.

Setting aside the obvious fact that collectors spend millions for originals while disdaining reproductions for reasons that are not entirely dismissable as snobbery, I have no objection to the fact that some people might want to believe they get the same value from a recent digitally animated Aubrey Hepburn avatar selling a candy bar as they do from her actual performance in Sabrina, I have no objection to some pervbro who wants to believe his blow up fuck doll provides as rich a relationship as he is capable of enjoying with a human partner, I have no objection to somebody who wants to believe that they make some profound connection with the Great Emancipator via his stiff animatronic duplicate in Disney World's Hall of Presidents. Hey, there's no accounting for taste.

If we say that the purpose of a brain is to yield intelligent behaviour (and secondly to control a body -- but we generally value people for what's in their cerebral cortex, not their brain stem) then a copy of a brain that yields intelligent behaviour serves the purpose just fine, at least for other people.

I'm an atheist so I don't believe the brain exists for a "purpose" in the way you seem to mean. This is not a quibble, because the theology here already figures intelligence as purposively designed in a way that smuggles your erroneous conclusions into your framing of your position in that very dispute. Your second framing of the brain as "controlling" the body is also considerably more problematic and prejudicial than you seem to realize. The brain IS the body, not a separate or superior supervisor of it. There is a whiff here of the very dualism you falsely attribute to opponents of your faith-based formulation of the "info-soul." I also think this business of introducing "control" into the picture so early is rather symptomatic, but we needn't go into all that. I do hope you see a therapist on a regular basis.
 

If you're a true materialist you accept that the brain is just a physical object with some complex chemical and electrical processes being responsible for its behaviour. It stands to reason that modelling those processes accurately should allow the same behaviour.

Not only does this assertion not "stand to reason," but it is a patent absurdity. I am a materialist in the matter of red wagons, but I hardly think a computer modeling a red wagon would be one, even if it might generate an image I would recognize as the representation of one. I certainly would not expect a modeled red wagon to be capable of all the things a red wagon is, nor (knowing what I do know of computer modeling) would I expect that those shared recognizably red wagonish effects would be achieved in the same way by the red wagon and the red wagon model. Not incidentally, I do not agree that we know at present that the material processes that give rise to the experience of thought (including the experience of witnessing its exhibition in others) are reducible to only those chemical and electrical processes in the brain -- and also possibly elsewhere in the body -- that we presently know and in the way we presently know them. They certainly might, but our present accounts are hilariously far from sufficient to pretend we know for sure. And there is no need in the least to invoke supernatural phenomena to recognize the highly provisional status of much of our present understanding of brain processes and to treat grandiloquent extrapolations from our present knowledge onto futurological imagineering predictions with extreme skepticism and their confident proponents as ridiculous.

You could get really silly and claim that a model of a human brain which "seems" intelligent is actually just simulating intelligence and the model is just accurately predicting the behaviour of a human brain and outputting that behavioural prediction, but then you're just arguing semantics.

How terrible it would be to elicit the judgment that I am being "silly" from you of all people! You are acting as though AI or simulated apparent persons are actual accomplishments, not futurological fancies, and that my skepticism about their realization given the poverty of our understanding is some kind of a denial of facts in evidence. You'll forgive me, but it is not the least bit silly nor merely semantic for me to point out that AI is not in evidence, that AI champions are always certain AI is around the corner when it serially fails to arrive, that our understanding of intelligence is incomplete in ways that seem likely to bedevil the construction of actually intelligent/agentic artifacts for some time, and that AI discourse and the subcultures of its enthusiasts have always been and remain indebted to pathological overconfidence, uninterrogated metaphors, troubling antipathies to materiality and biology, sociopathic aspirations of mastery, control, omniscience none of which bode well for the project to which they are devoted.