Is my "soul" me in any meaningful way, and why should I be concerned?

AlexDTX said:

No. You are still defining soul (Heb: nephesh, Greek: psuche) as memory. Our souls are spiritual beings of our selves, not just memories. Also, God would never bring to life the abominations of our hands, and, I might add, Satan's inspirations.

Also, your comparison of machine thoughts to tiny insects is very humanistic. All life has intelligence that goes beyond the corporeal brains of the creatures. Animals and insects have spirits. They are not same as human spirits. Consider what Paul says about life in his discussion of our future glorified bodies.

1Co 15:38 But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed [include here, species] his own body.
1Co 15:39 All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.​

This is easily understood by eating different creatures. The meat of mammals differs from mammal to mammal as does the meat of different birds or fishes. Each species is unique, which is why species can not cross breed with other species.

1Co 15:40 There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.
1Co 15:41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.​

While speaking of stars and planets, Paul is speaking metaphorically of spiritual lives. Our souls and spirits are different from one another as much as they differ from our bodies. Paul, of course, is trying to help the Corinthians understand how different our glorified bodies will be from our natural bodies. But his point also touches on all life. This includes angelic lives which are spiritual lives. Angels also are unique and not all the same. Especially if they were all created one by one by God. There is no indication that angels reproduce, and there are several descriptions of different kinds of angels.

Life forms do not require the same life force in each species. Machines made by men will never have life, with the exception of demons inhabiting the machines, which I believe will be the case with the "beast" in the book of Revelations which may be an AI that becomes inhabited. But those demons were made good by God first, who then chose to rebel against God.

Click to expand...

We've already digitized the brain of a worm... and even gave it a robotic body out of legos.
Scientists upload a worm's mind into a Lego robot - CNN

So it doesn't have a spirit, yet it acts like the worm does

Radagast said:

You can do two things here without any problems:

1) Ask a question and get answers

2) Propose an idea and give good reasons for it

Click to expand...

Well, we've already begun digitally uploading small animals... back in 2015.

Scientists upload a worm's mind into a Lego robot - CNN

But what I'm really asking has more to do with the identity problem:
Personal Identity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
My personality and memories certainly seem to be encoded in the brain. So if some spiritual thing like is what gets the reward or punishment for what my brain chooses in life, is this a meaningful motivator? If this spirit doesn't have my memories or my personality - then I am not sure why I would consider it to be me.

So perhaps in fairness I should not have brought up the tech aspect. That seems to have thrown people off. The reason I included it is because it brought the question of personal identity into focus for me.

This was prompted by spending a lot of time studying machine learning since that's really where a ton of the jobs in my industry are going to be. Since so much of it is inspired by biology, the most effective types are loosely based on brain architecture, like reinforcement learning in particular. You can even use this to get a robot to learn motor skills on it's own, just like a newborn baby twitching around while it's brain figures out which neurons connect to which muscles by randomly firing and then using visual feedback. I even got to see a demo in person where researches got a robot to train itself to put toast in a toaster using this method. Thus, a computer can be trained to learn in the same way I learn.

Neural networks are encroaching on human's pattern-finding abilities. Start with a poor model of a thing -> observe outcome -> alter internal model appropriately -> observe outcome -> repeat until internal model gives results that match real world closely enough. We call this "practice makes perfect". NNs are still lagging behind humans in training efficiency but the gap is closing very rapidly. Thus, a computer can recognize and encode patterns in a very similar way to how I do (and even better, since it's brain isn't limited by skull size...).

The general gist is that I see a genaral trend of understanding individual aspects of how my brain does different things (except way faster, and way better also, look up recent research on Generative Adversarial Networks. Crazy stuff!). So given another decade or two of neurologists studying the brain, and AI researchers reverse-engineering this to apply the techniques to AI, I don't see why combining these in the way the brain doesn't wouldn't result in something that thinks and acts like a human.

(Another example of researchers making breakthroughs by imitating the brain: convolutional neural nets, which can sift out irrelevant data - New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks. This is from a mere few months ago.)

So I was thinking about whether or not I would consider such a thing, with memories encoded to match my memories perfectly, to be me in a meaningful way, and I feel like I wouldn't. But then I began to wonder why I would consider a body-less spirit to be "me" if it doesn't even have the memories stored in my brain.

Maybe you don't consider this a "good enough" reason to consider that we may eventually have something artificial that could pass for a human. But come on, this is a philosophy forum. The core of philosophy is asking questions that challenge even your own preconcieved notion of the world. If philosophers throughout history all just stopped thinging about things they didn't have "good enough" reason to consider, there wouldn't be this entire field. Plato could have just accepted that the world we get through our senses is effectively all there is, and never come up with his allegory of the cave that is taught in basic philosophy classes.

hengesthorsa said:

But the article says it doesn't act exactly as the worm does:

"While the developers say it will be some time before the Lego bot will be avoiding predators or searching for a mate, scientists say the project shows that artificial intelligence, or AI as it is known, is coming out of the realm of science fiction."

Click to expand...

"It doesn't do X... yet." is not a really strong argument. This is really just a modern take on the "if God wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings" argument.

hengesthorsa said:

It just seemed that you responded as if the worm's behaviors had really been recreated.

I didn't mean to take issue with what you said per se.

Click to expand...

You may have responded to the wrong person. Fair, I should have read the article more carefully and not used the word "exact".

AlexDTX said:

It is still not alive. This is why Elon Musk warns us to be wary of Artificial Intelligence. It will behave like it is alive, but it will have neither heart, soul, conscience, nor spirit. The digitized worm is still a machine. The techno gurus think they will have immortality if they can "upload" their minds into machines. It is a pipe dream. They will still be dead and in the lake of fire in everlasting torment, while a machine with no life will act like them in the living world. They will never experience the "life" of those machines while they are burning in hell.

Click to expand...

Bit of a side note -

You should read "I, Robot" by Asimov. It's a fantastically creative book (not really a dark take on AI either, which is nice) where he explores the idea of robotic conscience. Even though he's a sci-fi author his work has had a ton of influence on robotics, as others have tried to envision how to keep AI from "going rogue".

He imagines a future where we program three laws into all robots:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

And then the rest of the book is short stories about how things can still go wrong without those laws being broken - but this isn't all that different from what happens with humans ("the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and all that)

hengesthorsa said:

It is not an argument at all in this case. You referred to the article as if the lego robot behaved "exactly" like the worm when the article states that that is not so. I mentioned it just to draw your attention to the article that you linked to.

Further, "it can't do X" at present is not like the wings thing. All humans who attempted flight could see that flight was POSSIBLE because birds and bats could do it. We have no such model here.

Click to expand...

We have the animal itself... Unless you believe the other parts that are unmapped yet are magic, and therefore will never be studyable?

hengesthorsa said:

Those robot stories are interesting, classic science fiction. But, as Book-A-Minute said years ago (Book-A-Minute SF/F: I, Robot), they're more like logic puzzles than like any kind of extrapolative storytelling (though, as you suggested, they have had an effect on actual robotics, that I can believe).

I enjoy those stories, but some of the robots are more like very literal-minded humans than anything else. "Robbie" is the best of the lot, with its thinly veiled sexual current, and the implicit questions about how we relate to objects and machines.

Sometimes Asimov was a literary artist and sometimes he was more a puzzle-maker. Both are valuable talents, of course. That's for another thread, though.

Click to expand...

Indeed! I was just side-noting on the idea of robot consciences.

AlexDTX said:

Thank you for the recommendation. I have read Asimov. Still fiction. Not reality or truth.

Click to expand...

Well, of course, I'm not sure what the fictionality of it has to do with anything - I was just bringing up that people are working on the idea of robotic consciences.