Sentience as life

Another of my "Automata blogs"

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Whilst I find Descartes thoroughly interesting I find his description of humans as nothing more than biological machines disheartening. I don't necessarily believe in any sort of external soul but I do believe that life is much more than biological mechanisms that happen to work in tandem. I believe that sentience is the key to whether or not a being is alive, self-awareness, instinct; these things are present in animals but not in machines. A machine is nothing more than a series of pre-coded algorithms and binary codes. Even the most advanced machines currently built cannot come close to life, they can only mimic. Whilst it could be argued that this is the mimetic faculty at work I do not believe this is so. The mimetic faculty is learning and I don't believe that machine 'learn', they can only be reprogrammed. The fact that "To simulate a virtual human brain using existing technology would require a supercomputer the size of the Pentagon" (source BBC Focus magazine, issue 209, November 2009, p. 122) would suggest that mechanicals are not even close to replicating the complexity of nature. I am fully aware that Descartes was writing at a time when life was much less well understood but I still find his dismissive attitude towards life as nothing more than mechanical action as short sighted; perhaps he harboured a secret messiah complex.

Having said this, however, I do believe that, as technology advances, we could well see virtual brains developed that are sentient and are free thinking. In this months BBC Focus magazine (the source for my previous quote, which I will bring to this weeks seminar) there is an article dedicated to a group of scientists in Switzerland who are attempting to build a virtual brain inside a supercomputer. Software that will be able to "think, remember and even get angry" (p. 27); the key point here is not mimic the physical affects of an emotional response, but to actually have that emotional response. The reason for this is that the current research being done is reverse engineered from real, living mammal brains. Starting with rats and working their way up to humans. One of the scientists involved in the study is so optimistic that he believes a fully functioning 'human brain' is only 10 years away. The biggest difference between what the Swiss scientists are attempting and what has been done before is most easily explained here:

"Synaptic plasticity is the basis for learning and memory, a feature that Blue Brain [the name of the Swiss team's software] replicates to set it apart from most approaches to mimicking the mind. Both artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience often try to imitate the brain's abilities, such as playing chess, with some success. So while IBM's Deep Blue chess computer managed to beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, it wouldn't be able to automatically learn a new board game. A biologically accurate virtual brain could." (p. 30)

This highlights the remarkable difference with what has been tried before and what these scientists are attempting now. Unlike previous attempts they aren't just programming a computer they are infact building a synthetic brain. If they are successful one thing I wonder is whether or not their synthetic brains could be shrunk down to the same size of human brain tissue and then replace damaged or destroyed brain tissue in humans. Perhaps this would be a better use of resources than attempting to create true artificial intelligence.

I do not necessarily disagree with this line of research but I do feel that it is the wrong way to go. The fascination of creating life, actual tangible life, is intriguing and I do not fear what a sentient robot might do (a la Skynet in the Terminator franchise); but I do fear how morality may come to play with this. I believe that machines, non-sentient, should be servants; built by man to make man's life easier. If a sentient life is created then we will lose every opportunity that mechanicals give us to move towards a more truly free society. A society free from wage slavery and corporate oppression, a society free from non-equality, a society where people can live and not worry about working a dead end job just to keep the wolves from the door. This is the opportunity that non-sentient automata offer us as a species. I believe that if we are able to create a sentient life form entirely from our own technology then I believe they are the same as us; for me awareness is life and if an autonomous robot is self aware then it should be afforded the same rights as other life, and not used as slave labour. For me the only difference, that would exist, is that whilst we are a Carbon based life form they would be Silicon based.