Will machines ever come to life and take over the world?

Will machines ever come to life and take over the world?  Here are the important basic facts behind what "you" are, ensoulment into a body, how computers work, how artificial intelligence works, and how it all ties together.  No wasting time here-- I cover everything you need to know about all of that in under 21 minutes.  Heck, I even throw  in a fun thought experiment about The Flash!  Who's the fastest man alive _now_, Barry Allen?!!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, hello. This is Anthony Camvariati. Welcome to Get to the Point. Today I want to lay out my understanding of artificial intelligence from a philosophical perspective and tie it in with spirituality to explain what to expect and whatnot. Basically, there's this belief out there that people have that machines due to artificial intelligence will at some point become self-aware and sentient. And given areas of things that I've studied myself, I want to look into that and explain why I don't think it's ultimately going to be a problem. But it does take a lot of understanding and a lot of explanation to go through that. So that's what I'm going to do. First off, let's talk spirituality. There's this concept of self-awareness. The idea is that there's this consciousness that exists, that thing that you define as yourself. You have this human body sitting here, and there's this sense of something that feels like it's sitting somewhere just behind your eyes. Sure, there are all these other body parts there, but they feel like stuff you can control by applying your thoughts to somehow activate them. And there are also all these things that your body's doing all the time that you don't control at all. They're just automatic processes. But it's unmistakable that the quote unquote you, whatever that is, is an animated force of this body of yours. Now, a lot of people have had out-of-body experiences and they've reported on them. There are books about the subject, certainly. The general consensus I've taken from these out-of-body experience reports is that while you're alive, there's some sort of quote unquote silver cord that ties you to your physical body. So even if you go out of body, you're still very much tied to it. So that kind of explains the sense of how you're alive and you are animating a body. But that also tells us that this self, this animating force, whatever it is, is the best way to characterize you in your truest sense. While inhabiting a body, you're the ghost in the machine, so to speak. Without the body, you still exist, but your body is certainly an interface that allows you to interact with this living world around us. We're all here and we're all very much tied to these physical bodies for a very long period of time in many cases. But as far as we know, the one constant with everyone is that everyone dies. So it's always a temporary situation where we have these bodies that we are tied to. At this point, we need to pick a word for that essence that is quote unquote you that we've been talking about. A few obvious possibilities come to mind. Spirit, soul, and mind. Now the word mind is generally associated greatly with the brain. Like I said, the body is an interface with the living world. So clearly the brain is able to do things like perform mathematical calculations and figure out logic puzzles. It's also able to learn information and recall that information. Or failing to recall it, a lot of times it'll recognize the information when it is exposed to it again, anyway. In my own personal experience, I find that when I'm asleep and dreaming, a lot of my mind in the rational and mathematical sense just doesn't seem to be there. So from that I'm going to take the leap and say that part of this quote unquote mind is actually very much physically part of the body. It might not all be in the brain, but that's an oversimplification that covers it enough for our purposes here. It's also worth noting that there's something out there called mental illness. When someone delves into how mental illness works, it becomes rather clear that there's something in there, something in the mind doing thinking and perhaps also feeling, that feels like, quote unquote, the self, but it isn't actually the self. Rather, it's something else that's working contrary toward what the mentally healthy, quote unquote, self is trying to think and feel. So that gives us an even stronger argument to say that we really shouldn't use mind to define this ghost in the machine that we're talking about. So we come to spirit and soul. When I look at spirit and soul, I'd like to go back to Myers Briggs' personality theory. I see the spirit is very much tied to the N of Myers Briggs. That's the intuitive part. The N is it's a form of perception. Perception is basically an information intake process. The S with sensing is an intake process just like that. And S as an intake process is pretty straightforward and easy for a person to understand. So the N parallels that. So the very nature of an intake process shows us that we're talking about something that's already there before the quote unquote self actually does anything to it. In other words, it could theoretically be there and exist, whether we perceive it or not. That's kind of how we think of the physical world. Even though technically with quantum physics, we know that it's not really there until or unless someone perceives it. But regardless, anything we're intaking is kind of going to get a reputation as being something that is not actually the quote unquote self. So that's a good reason to argue that spirit isn't the appropriate name for this. Which brings us to soul. In Myers Briggs, the soul would be tied to the F letter. That's feeling, which is a form of judgment. It parallels thinking with a T where logic and rationality are applied. Feeling isn't so much about emotions and the off-seeming randomness of them, but rather it's actually about judgments that are value judgments. The idea is that one is making decisions that can't just be rationally calculated out. It's more about personal preferences. Like say, I want to go to this restaurant tonight rather than that one because I just feel like going to one over the other. So this is something that you're doing with your own head. Specifically, if anything, it's more from the emotions within your head than the part in there that's like a computer processor. And since this is judgment, it's you acting on the world around you. It's output. And you can't have output without you yourself doing some sort of processing to create that output. So bingo, that quote unquote self that we're talking about sounds very much like a soul. So we'll use that designation for it. So in our general everyday experience, we have this sense that there is our soul and it's connected with a body and a mind and these intuitive inspirations and whatnot, and there are all these other souls walking around as well. So how does a soul get into a body anyway? Well, I don't know if we can answer that specifically, but we can still talk about it. We have a pretty good sense of when a soul leaves a body, so maybe that can help inform us about when it enters. We know that if you stop certain physical processes from happening, the body dies and the soul leaves it. You have to do that whole breathing thing where you're extracting oxygen from outside your body and feeding into all your cells. You have to have that heart beating and pumping all that blood around. And you have to have that part of the brain in there subconsciously telling all these body parts to keep doing their thing. When a vital system fails, the soul leaves the body. But all the other systems fail and stop too. Sometimes it seems that the soul just leaves the body when it, as they say, loses the desire to live. But again, this isn't an all or nothing process. Either you've got everything acting and operating and working, or you don't. But another thing that's worth thinking about is that every human body is made out of trillions of cells, and those cells themselves fit some definition of life as well. As a body is developing a utero, those cells are doing their own thing, and they end up connecting with the mother's body via an umbilical cord. So we honestly can't tell at what point the soul actually inhabits the body. We just know that it has to be all set to be a completely independent entity by the time the umbilical cord is cut, or stops functioning anyway. So that establishes the process of souls inhabiting bodies, though of course it doesn't answer our question of how the soul gets into the body. Maybe the soul just floats over, makes sure the body in utero has enough active functionality for its tastes, and then attaches that silver cord to it. It's quite the commitment, really. But obviously something like that must be happening here. As an aside, I want to do a fun thought experiment here. In recent years I watched many episodes of this television show on the CW network called The Flash. I enjoy my superheroes with their superpowers quite a bit. Though I'm more of a Marvel fan overall, I did end up delving into DC more with the show Arrow featuring the green arrow and this so-called Arrowverse that they built up around it. The first show that expanded off Aver was The Flash. It's less grounded and more tied to science fiction, so at one point it was certainly one of my favorite shows. Perhaps even my favorite show. Anyway, I bring up The Flash because he's perfect for this thought experiment. As many people know, The Flash is a big thing instead of run really fast. Now, as part of that, they've decided to give him this ability to travel through time. Presumably, running fast enough opens up time portals and such. It's all science fiction, so we're all taking a leap of faith to go along with it anyway, but what we're going to do here is talk about something from time travel that I really hadn't thought much about before watching the flash, and that's the concept of time duplicates. Here's a scenario. The flash has some sort of extremely long open stretch of space to run on which goes around a circle. It's enough of a stretch that'll be able to get up to speed in order to time travel, and it's long enough that it'll reach the same spot on the circumference of the circle, say every twenty seconds. Let's say he starts running and gets up to time traveling to be within a few seconds, and then holds that speed for we'll say sixty seconds. So we'll start at time equals zero. So once he reaches time equals sixty seconds, we'll say he moves over a few feet to one side or the other, and then he travels back in time exactly 20 seconds. So now it's time equals 40 seconds, and he's running at this speed, and he's standing right next to the flash from time equals 40 seconds, who hasn't time traveled yet. Hey, young guy, don't time travel 20 seconds from now. Let's both stop running. So now the flash who was about to time travel doesn't, and they both stop running, and now we have two flashes. Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of speculation you can go into about what causes what to happen and what propagates through time and all that, but that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is that we have a scenario where there are two flashes and they're standing right next to each other at the same time. So how does the soul work in that case anyway? I'd have to say that the flash who did time travel has a continuity of consciousness over time. He reflects what you and I experience. It seems apparent that he has the same soul in him that was there when there was only one flash. But that said, what about the flash who didn't time travel? Well, in his case, he was born, lived his life all the way up to a point where he'd been running for 40 seconds, and then suddenly this other version of himself shows up and tells him not to time travel. In fact, it very well may have been exactly the same soul that the other flash had all the way up until that 40 second mark, when for the very first time he experiences something different from what the other version of Flash experienced. Now, let's say that you are the Flash. Are you just inhabiting one of the bodies and now suddenly there's another body standing there next to you with another soul in it? Did that soul exist all this time too? Did you split one soul into two souls? What would have happened if you said, hey, don't time travel? And then the other flash said, Nah, I'm still gonna time travel anyway. Then he just disappears at the 60 second mark, and you're still here. Does he become you? Does he go somewhere else? In a sense, he kind of closes the loop, sure, but maybe he doesn't become you and then he just crashes into you right when you show up. So maybe he doesn't, maybe he just disappears. I I don't know what happens to him. So even if you end up splitting your soul into two pieces, is there any way to unify those two pieces together again? What about after you both die? Can you merge back together if you want to? I mean, can souls time travel? The reason I bring up this whole thought experience is because it ties very much into a concept that's relevant for other parts of our discussion here as well, soul copies. If one were to argue that, quote unquote, the body makes the soul, so to speak, as in it didn't exist until it existed within the body, then constructing the exact same body, or perhaps mainly at least the exact same brain, would in theory create a second soul that's just like the first one. And that ties in with that whole brain uploading concept as well. Now, let's talk about artificial intelligence. The brain uploading is kind of outside the scope of this, but I think some of the logic follows from what I'm talking about. And this gets you on the right track for thinking about it, perhaps. Now, let's talk about artificial intelligence. To do that, we have to start by talking about how computers actually work. At its most basic level, a computer is circuits. What happens is that when you have electricity, what you do is just gather up a charge first, and then if and however it has a good route to take to discharge, it discharges. It's very much analogous to a waterfall. Charging up your electricity is like bringing water up a hill. Yeah, the water can sit and stay there at the top of the hill, but if you put a big long trowel in the side of your pool of water and then tilt that trowel downward a few degrees, the water will slowly pour through the trowel and out onto lower ground. If you tilt it a few more degrees, it pours out a little more quickly. This is what the concept of resistance is all about. When you have more resistance, the electricity only pours a little bit. When you have less resistance, the electricity pours much more quickly. Next up with computers is something called programmable array logic or programmable logic arrays. Basically, this is where you set things up so that you get the electricity to stay and to flow in certain configurations in a very complex and completely organized manner. If electricity is flowing through a wire or being stored in a pool, that's a one. If there's no electricity flowing or there's no charge in that pool, it's a zero. And with that you have binary numbers. And with that you can have the computer perform certain complicated instructions, like take the zero zero one zero in these four pools and add them to the zero zero zero one in these other four pools, and you get zero zero one one, which you store in a third set of pools. Have you ever seen a water powered clock in action? It's a very good analogy to what happens here. So anyway, that's fundamentally what's going on in a computer at the core. Billions and billions of things like that. Obviously there's more to it, but for our purposes, this is the important point. This is the point we start from. Now let's talk artificial intelligence. The wording reminds me of the phrase computer viruses, actually. Though computers have a lot in common with human brains, we use these types of words because they kind of mean what they mean in the human body, but it's not as one to one as you might think. A computer is always a whole bunch of circuits that are operating in a fundamentally clockwork way based on the laws of physics. If you know all the data that's stored in it and you know how all the circuits are set up and how all the different capacitors and inductors and so forth function, then you can work out exactly what it's going to do as soon as you put current into it. Just like you can work out exactly how quickly the water is going to flow down that trail, once you have water at the top of the trail. In other words, a computer always does whatever it's told to do. The issue, however, is that it doesn't always do what you tell it to do. Sometimes instructions of what to do come from somewhere else. That's what's going on with what we call computer viruses. Someone fed in some instructions for the computer from outside, and then your computer, which was looking at whatever instructions were stored in that spot to find out what to do next, just follow those instructions. And in the case of computer viruses, that something is malicious stuff that you certainly don't want, but that's what the computer has been told to do, and that's what it does. Now let's talk about machine learning and neural nets. Basically, what's going on with these is that the computer is running certain code, getting certain results, and then feeding those results back to itself in a way that it'll use them to change what it'll run the next time. It's already being instructed as to what's quote unquote better or quote unquote worse, so it changes things up according to whatever approach is better. We call it learning because it's very similar to what happens with us humans. If you touch a hot stove and get burnt, you decide that you don't want to do that the next time. If directing your muscles to operate in a certain way causes you to propel yourself forward, to walk or to run, use that technique over and over again moving forward. Literally to move forward. The thing about artificial intelligence is that nowadays computers are so complicated that we humans can't keep track of every single thing that we're feeding into them. So a lot of times different stuff works together and creates outcomes that we didn't expect. But the more good stuff you put in there to feed into your program to improve it, and the more you set the computer up to pursue certain outcomes rather than other outcomes, generally speaking, the better the results you tend to get. Now let's put everything together. We talked about self-awareness and we talked about computers. So let's picture a computer that has all the physical complexity that it needs in order to do everything the human brain does. Heck, let's say we build a machine that completely replicates every internal system of a human being. Cells would basically be nanomachines, they file instructions and use available energy and resources to build more and more of themselves with appropriate variations as needed, and the process continues on. So say we build that, and then we turn it on. So does a soul come by, hook up the silver cord, and attach itself to this machine? Do we sit and wait a while to see if a soul shows up? What if we build a billion of these? Do a billion souls show up? What about uploading an existing soul from an existing body into one of these machines? Can you just make a second copy of that soul and now there are two of them? Or does the first body have to die and then you hope the soul from it just goes into the new Android body you made from there? Or what? So those are the questions we're looking at with this. What's going on here? And is artificial intelligence going to become sentient and take over the world or not? So here's my judgment on all this. I don't believe the souls are going to inhabit android bodies no matter their complexity. It just feels like the souls for some reason go into human bodies, and that is the standard way things work. Anything else is different. Usually anything else is less complex, but at the very least, everything else is has a different structure, has a fundamentally different core of how it is built. So I don't believe the souls are going to inhabit android bodies no matter how complex those bodies get. Therefore, I don't believe machines are ever going to truly attain sentience. I think it's just going to look like they have, but it's all just going to be complex circuits doing things that we don't expect because we don't understand them perfectly. So that's my assessment of what's going on. That's all the information that I find relevant that comes to mind that I could put together for this from my artificial intelligence background, my electrical engineering background, my spiritual study, trying to get to the heart of what's going on with spirituality instead of specifics from different religions, just kind of putting it all together. So that's what I've got, and that's my judgment based off of that. So that's my ruling. So what do you think? Do you accept all the premises that I put forth in this? Do you debate some of them? Do you have some reasoning that I didn't consider? Do you have a well-formed opinion of your own of some sort, based off of your own experiences and perspectives and education and understandings of things? Well, time to think it over and see what verdict you come up with. I have my verdict. I made my ruling, you are the appeals court, and now it goes to you.