Three Fronts in the Uploading Discussion -- A Guest Post by Jim Fehlinger

Longtime friend and friend-of-blog Jim Fehlinger posted a cogent summarizing judgment (which doesn't mean concluding by any means) of the Uploading discussion that's been playing out in this Moot non-stop for days. I thought it deserved a post of its own. In the Moot to this post, I've re-posted my responses to his original comments to get the ball rolling again. I've edited it only a very little, for continuity's sake, but the link above will take the wary to the originals.--d

It strikes me that this conversation (/disagreement) has been proceeding along three different fronts (with, perhaps, three different viewpoints) that have not yet been clearly distinguished:

1. Belief in/doubts about GOFAI ("Good Old-Fashioned AI") -- the 50's/60's Allen Newell/Herbert Simon/Seymour Papert/John McCarthy/Marvin Minsky et al. project to replicate an abstract human "mind" (or salient aspects of one, such as natural-language understanding) by performing syntactical manipulations of symbolic representations of the world using digital computers. The hope initially attached to this approach to AI has been fading for decades. Almost a quarter of a century ago, in the second edition of his book, Hubert Dreyfus called GOFAI a "degenerating research program":

Almost half a century ago [as of 1992] computer pioneer Alan Turing suggested that a high-speed digital computer, programmed with rules and facts, might exhibit intelligent behavior. Thus was born the field later called artificial intelligence (AI). After fifty years of effort [make it 70, now], however, it is now clear to all but a few diehards that this attempt to produce artificial intelligence has failed. This failure does not mean this sort of AI is impossible; no one has been able to come up with a negative proof. Rather, it has turned out that, for the time being at least, the research program based on the assumption that human beings produce intelligence using facts and rules has reached a dead end, and there is no reason to think it could ever succeed. Indeed, what John Haugeland has called Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI) is a paradigm case of what philosophers of science call a degenerating research program.

A degenerating research program, as defined by Imre Lakatos, is a scientific enterprise that starts out with great promise, offering a new approach that leads to impressive results in a limited domain. Almost inevitably researchers will want to try to apply the approach more broadly, starting with problems that are in some way similar to the original one. As long as it succeeds, the research program expands and attracts followers. If, however, researchers start encountering unexpected but important phenomena that consistently resist the new techniques, the program will stagnate, and researchers will abandon it as soon as a progressive alternative approach becomes available.

[That research program i]s still degenerating, as far as I know.

Dale and I agree in our skepticism about this one. Gareth Nelson, it would seem (and many if not most & Hists, I expect) still holds out hope here. I think it's a common failing of computer programmers. Too close to their own toys, as I said before. ;-&

2. The notion that, even if we jettison the functionalist/cognitivist/symbol-manipulation approach of GOFAI, we still might simulate the low-level dynamic messiness of a biological brain and get to AI from the bottom up instead of the top down. Like Gerald Edelman's series of "Darwin" robots or, at an even lower and putatively more biologically-accurate level, Henry Markram's "Blue Brain" project.

Gareth seems to be on-board with this approach as well, and says somewhere above that he thinks a hybrid of the biological-simulation approach and the GOFAI approach might be the ticket to AI (or AGI, as Ben Goertzel prefers to call it).

Dale still dismisses this, saying that a "model" of a human mind is not the same as a human mind, just as a picture of you is not you.

I am less willing to dismiss this on purely philosophical grounds. I am willing to concede that if there were digital computers fast enough and with enough storage to simulate biological mechanisms at whatever level of detail turned out to be necessary (which is something we don't know yet) and if this sufficiently-detailed digital simulation could be connected either to a living body with equally-miraculously (by today's standards) fine-grained sensors and transducers, or to a (sufficiently fine-grained) simulation of a human body immersed in a (sufficiently fine-grained) simulation of the real word -- we're stacking technological miracle upon technological miracle here! -- then yes, this hybrid entity with a human body and a digitally-simulated brain, I am willing to grant, might be a good-enough approximation of a human being (though hardly "indistinguishable" from an ordinary human being, and the poor guy would certainly find verself playing a very odd role indeed in human society, if ve were the first one). I'm even willing to concede (piling more miracles on top of miracles by granting the existence of those super-duper-nanobots) the possibility of "uploading" a particular human personality, with memories intact, using something like the Moravec transfer (though again, the "upload" would find verself in extremely different circumstances from the original, immediately upon awakening). This is still not "modelling" in any ordinary sense of the word in which it occurs in contemporary scientific practice! It's an as-yet-unrealized (except in the fictional realm of the SF novel) substitution of a digitally-simulated phenomenon for the phenomenon itself (currently unrealized, that is, except in the comparatively trivial case in which the phenomenon is an abstract description of another digital computer).

However, I am unpersuaded, Moravec and Kurzweil and their fellow-travellers notwithstanding, that Moore's Law and the "acceleration of technology" are going to make this a sure thing by 2045. I am not even persuaded that we know enough to be able to predict that such a thing might happen by 20450, or 204500, whether by means of digital computers or any other technology, assuming a technological civilization still exists on this planet by then.

The physicist Richard C. Feynman, credited as one of the inventors of the idea of "nanotechnology", is quoted as having said "There's plenty of room at the bottom." Maybe there is. Hugo de Garis thinks we'll be computing using subatomic particles in the not too distant future! If they're right, then -- sure, maybe all of the above science-fictional scenarios are plausible. But others have suggested that maybe, just maybe, life itself is as close to the bottom as our universe permits when it comes to, well, life-like systems (including biologically-based intelligence). If that's so, then maybe we're stuck with systems that look more-or-less like naturally-evolved biochemistry.

3. Attitudes toward the whole Transhumanist/Singularitarian mishegas. What Richard L. Jones once called the "belief package", or what Dale commonly refers to as the three "omni-predicates" of & Hist discourse: omniscience=superintelligence; omnipotence=super-enhancements (including super-longevity); omnibenevolence=superabundance.

This is a very large topic indeed. It has to do with politics, mainly the politics of libertarianism (Paulina Boorsook, Cyberselfish, Barbrook & Cameron, "The Californian Ideology," religious yearnings (the "Rapture of the Nerds"), cult formation (especially sci-fi tinged cults, such as Ayn Rand's [or Nathaniel Branden's, if you prefer] "Objectivism", L. Ron Hubbard's "Scientology", or even Joseph Smith's Mormonism!), psychology (including narcissism and psychopathy/sociopathy), and other general subjects. Very broad indeed!

Forgive me for putting it this insultingly, but I fear Gareth may still be savoring the Kool-Aid here.

Dale and I are long past this phase, though we once both participated on the Extropians' mailing list, around or before the turn of the century. When we get snotty (sometimes reflexively so ;-&), it's the taste of the Kool-Aid we're reacting to, which we no longer enjoy, I'm afraid.