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June 4, 2006 I've broken John's latest article down into three questions. These aren't exactly how he asked them, but I'll take some liberty because I think these pretty much sum up his issues: 1. Is empathy required for intelligence? 2. Can intelligence be programmed into a computer and if so, how? 3. Is science good? Each answer requires nuance and has no simple yes or no answer, of course. I'm not going to use a supernatural definition of empathy, I'll just say that humans can feel as well as think, and one influences the other. There is some evidence that social connections helped enlarge the brains of the animals in our line and in the lines of other higher mammals. For example, a zoologist can tell just by looking at a monkey skull how many monkeys lived with that monkey in a group. There seems to be a link between keeping track of connections with individuals in your group and brain size. Many of the smartest mammals have these features. Some speculate that dolphins may posses a higher social intelligence than humans, but this isn't conclusive. There are some birds which are much less social but also demonstrate extreme intelligence. Cephalopods, octopus, squid and the like, are also remarkably intelligent for animals which are otherwise rather simple (at least compared with mammals and birds). They aren't social either, bu t bright enough to warrant special treatment. When experimenting on octopi, you must make sure to treat the animals humanely. Of course an octopus is not nearly as smart as even a small brained monkey, that isn't the point – the point is that the progress of intelligence can take other, non-social, paths in the animal kingdom. It takes big brains to be social and what we call feelings are a result of that social nature, but this doesn't imply that we couldn't have intelligence without feelings. Certainly, humans with bizarre brain conditions affecting their ability to feel can still think and still realize that they exist. Sentience is another tricky bit, and perhaps a better question would be, “Can human-like intelligence be realized without sentience?”, but that's for another article. Predators, which are often loners, also have bigger brains and mental ability compared to the animals which they prey on. The social thinkers lead the pack and won the thinking contest, so to speak, but this is by no means the only possible route as I mentioned above. Actually, hunting is the common thread of almost all of the smartest creatures, including chimps (which brutally hunt monkeys) and dolphins, so you might say, the ability to kill other animals for food and be aggressive is as or more important than empathy. Must computers be programmed to hunt and kill in order to be able to think? This issue is, however, moot for point two. How would I write a program to make a computer think? Who knows?! But I know this: we have no reason to think that anything supernatural goes on in the brain. Incidents of brain damage show that the most seemingly intangible things, feelings, dreams, your mind's eye, the ability to get a sense of things with many missing pieces of information, etc., are all products of the physical brain. Since the brain is a machine made from matter that follows natural rules, it can be reverse engineered. I imagine in the future that folk will map the brain network into software with enough accuracy that the software will also think and feel. Surely we will begin with lower animals and work our way up. We may also discover the rules involved during this gradual process, and be able to make a truly artificial intelligence on the way. So, the worst case is that we simply wait until we can copy what we already have. We do have some triumphs, however. For example, experiments with neural nets reveal that the nets can learn without being programmed, but we don't know exactly how or what they learn definitively. Neural nets are machines which can process information like computers, but are not necessarily digital computers. Some are analog devices, for example. They have been called cognizers by some to give them a unique name. Anyway, these days, given Moore's law, it's much easier to simply simulate a cognizer within a digital computer environment, quite probably similar to how we will eventually make computers think. We already have software which can interpolate missing data. Scaling an image up is a good simple example. If an image is 300x300 pixels across, and we scale it to 1000x1000, software looks at each pixel, “moves” them further apart from each other, and then fills in the missing information. One can normally scale a high quality picture up about 50% and still have rather good quality. Finally, as to point three, science itself isn't moral or immoral, how people use it is. Moving from stone to metal tools made farming and hunting much easier, but it also allowed humans to kill each other faster. Gun powder was invented for fireworks, but is also handy to kill and fight wars. It also lead to rocketry and eventually space travel, so it may save our species in the end. Overall, science has been positive. Humans live longer and healthier lives. Many diseases are cured and so forth. The world produces enough food to feed itself three times over. Don't let the Amish fool you – in the history of sentience on our planet, the technology which the Amish use is virtually identical to ours. They work metal, domesticate animals and farm. Technology is the only hope for mankind, so we have to avoid the tendency to become Amish, to say, “OK, that's FAR enough! We can't advance beyond THIS [arbitrary] point!” The planet happens to be friendly to human life at the moment, but climate changes, the sun changes, and big stuff from space will come down. We either embrace science and technology or go extinct. This isn't to say that we should blindly allow any research to go forward and ignore all ethics. But those making the ethical arguments ought to deeply understand the science first, and not base their ethical arguments on supernatural and non-verifiable claims. I might ask John how humanity will survive the explosion of the Sun or the next big asteroid impact without very advanced technology? Science, good or evil, is a necessity. Here is an article I just ran across about taking slices of living hippocampus of mammal brain and interfacing it with computer chips: http://www.physorg.com/news68465911.html And here is an article about what can happen when big rocks from space come to abrupt stops on our little planet after traveling at 60,000 miles per hour: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060601174729.htm Can metaphysics do a better job than physics against such threats? ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@gmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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