It’s not really about artificial intelligence — it’s so muddled I don’t think they understand what they’re talking about, except that whatever it is, they’re ag’in’ it. All the Answers in Genesis “journal” can do is publish a a vague complaint about mind-cloning
.
The dominant view of the constitution of the human being in modern times is physicalism. This view attempts to explain mental manifestations as an epiphenomenon of the brain to the exclusion of the soul, as opposed by dualism. According to the dominant view, the mind arose at some point during evolutionary development. As such, physicalists have attempted to transfer the human mind from one substrate to another, in a process called mind cloning.
We have? This is news to me. I don’t think anyone has even tried to transfer a human mind to a different substrate. I don’t even know how you would start to do such a thing, because the mind is inextricably intertwined with the brain.
Yeah, I just searched PubMed for mind cloning, “mind cloning”, and mind-cloning. No papers anywhere on anything like it. Thanks, AiG, now the NIH is giving me an icy stare and wondering if I’m some creationist nutcase.
That project leads to multiple problems. Until now the connectome of only 100,000 mouse neurons have been mapped, thus calling the feasibility of the project into question.
Quite rightly. I think we can say that scientists, even the physicalists he’s complaining about, call the feasibility of this imaginary process of “mind cloning”, which at best exists in the pages of science fiction novels, into question. Just as we call the fictions of the Bible into question.
Ethical issues also arise: would I be held responsible for my mind clone’s criminal activities? What if I and my mind clone vote against each other? Would mind cloning lead to the devaluation of human life?
Granting the absurdity for a moment, no — they’d be separate, autonomous beings. Who cares? We let individuals, and a “mind clone” would be an individual who can vote as they choose, although if they were truly a copy of your mind, wouldn’t they think the same way you do? Why would a copy lead to the devaluation of human life? This seems to be something Christians specialize in, but us non-Christians already oppose it.
This is the best they can do, a series of silly non-issues compounded by their own misconceptions. So, you want to compare materialist and supernatural concepts of the mind? Here you go, be illuminated.
Comparison of materialistic and supernatural creation of human consciousness. A. The materialistic viewpoint claims that consciousness is merely a by-product of the process of evolution from simple organisms to the human being. B. The supernatural view holds to the special creation of human kind and all other groups of organisms. The consciousness as well as the soul is created into the human being directly by God.
Don’t you just love meaningless graphs? I start with the axes. What is measured on the X-axis? Is it quantifying the amount of evolution and the amount of creation? The Y axis isn’t even labeled. It suggests that “evolution” proponents think there is a progressive increase in “mind” from simple organisms to humans, and that there is a discrete point where “consciousness” exists.
Meanwhile, creationists think there is a measurable undefined Y-axis something, and that cats have more of it than dogs or horses, and that god at some moment in time (should the X-axis be days of creation, from 1 to 6? And weren’t all the animals shown created on the same day?) conjured them into existence with some fixed quantity of consciousness-stuff? I do not understand any of that. It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-quantitative picture of something they don’t understand.
So, what is the goal of this paper? At least they spend a paragraph on that.
In this paper, the main area of mind cloning will be examined and its feasibility will be assessed, and relevant ethical issues discussed. It will also examine the reasons why the human soul exists as an alternative explanation of the human mind as opposed to monism.
Mind cloning is not a thing, it is not feasible, and we already know that the only ethical issues they’re going to bring up are silly and irrelevant, since we can’t clone minds. The arguments for the soul…well, you already know what they’re going to be. This is Answers in Genesis! The answer is that the Bible says so.
Once again, we get a pseudoscientific graphical illustration of the difference between a brain and a soul. Does this help?
The difference between the brain and the soul. A. The physical brain has three-dimensional spatial extent. B. In comparison, the soul is intangible, yet exists.
I guess the difference is that the brain is tangible and exists, while the soul is intangible and exists. I don’t see how making some strange 3D graph and putting question marks after the axes helps, but OK, I guess someone was reassured by it. Some innumerate, fuzzy-brained someone.
Let’s see one example of how they deal with ethical issues.
Some may ask, but what about frozen embryos? What happens when the soul does not seem to manifest itself? The question is easily answered. When people are asleep or are in a coma, their bodily functions slow down, albeit they do not cease entirely (Moreland 2010; Moreland and Rae 2000, 227). When an embryo is on ice, its functions slow down dramatically, although not entirely, just as the metabolism of a hibernating bear slows down during winter but does not come to a complete stop. But arguably, putting an embryo on ice is a form of torture, and it is a logical non-sequitur that the embryo lacks a soul.
(I should mention that most of their citations show their ideas are based on the writing of JP Moreland, a philosopher and theologian, who also happens to be a heretical old earth creationist.)
All of it is one logical non sequitur after another. How do we know that an embryo has a soul, an entity that has not been demonstrated to exist? Because it would be illogical to think it lacks one. I think the author mistakes his Christian assumptions for logic.
Speaking of illogic, I’ll leave you with the author’s predictable final conclusion, a little lump of evangelical glurge.
However, humans can live forever, but not in a way fashioned by men in an attempt to escape God’s rule. They must humbly repent of their sins and submit to God’s will. That explains the death of Christ: he died for us that we may have eternal life (John 3:16; 17:3). If we trust in Christ, then all diseases, all our sorrows and death itself will one day pass away (Revelation 21:4). This is the true way of salvation and eternal life, not a futile materialistic fantasy that equates a human with his mind, and tries to achieve immortality by perpetuating it.
Logical non-sequitur.
What? Yes it is, PZ. It’s clearly measuring quantities of “A” in the first figure and quantities of “B” in the second figure. I can’t believe I have to explain this to you!
Wait, they got something correct? Yes “the human soul” exists as an alternative to monism in explaining the phenomenon of “mind” much like MOND exists as an alternative explanation to “dark matter”. Existing as a concept described in words on a page, however, does not make something true, else turning on the LHC in Europe would have caused the planet to be consumed by mini-black holes.
But please do go on telling people that “the human soul” exists as an explanation, AIGJ. It’s much more honest than (nearly?) anything else you do.
Well, they equally successfully measured the intangible soul in intangible units.
Intangible, measured in intangible equals infinite or something equally silly.
Google scholar did pop up some papers on mind cloning, a mixture of similar drivel and speculative works that are pretty much science fiction, with a couple that document how improbable a notion that such a thing is to accomplish.
Next week: angels and angles confused on the head of a pin.
…although if they were truly a copy of your mind, wouldn’t they think the same way you do?
Well, if a particular party or referendum was advocating expanded or equal legal rights for mind-clones, then mind-clone-me might vote for that party or referendum, while original-organic-me would likely vote against them.
Time for a paper on mapping functions for the soul. Most people would argue the three-dimensional soul is not relativisticly invariant so we probably need a fourth dimension, probably rhythm? I could go for that.
Considerable effort has been put into ensuring this does not happen. Ice crystals are disruptive to cells. Cryoprotectrants, usually glycerol, are added before the embryos are chilled to suppress ice formation.
If one were to attempt such an argument, one would need to present evidence or logical arguments in support. None are presented, so I reject this claim.
If my mind is cloned, does that entail I can be at two places simultaneously? Curious minds want to know.
How can they have an opinion on Artificial Intelligence, when they can’t describe intelligence and sentience without invoking some metaphysical nonsense?
I am sure that the idea of persistence of self after death is comforting to some people.
As I have been remarking to people since my wife died (she was Roman Catholic), if she was correct in her beliefs, I will tear the afterlife apart seeking her. If I am correct, all that is left of her is the works she wrote and the memories of the living.
Men die, cattle die.
Someday, you too will die.
One thing lives forever,
World fame.
She had some small measure of world fame.
OT but apparently employees are can’t be fired for violating workplace rules and treating people rudely as long as it is because of a sincerely held religious belief:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/09/01/us/kansas-teacher-suspend-settle/index.html
Re: Embryos on ice
Is it possible to torture a creature without a functioning nervous system?
So, do identical twins start out with a two-soul embryo or does a new soul get delivered when the egg splits? Of do I have half a soul? I wouldn’t think souls would be divisible. Or am I the twin with no soul?
What about when two embryo’s fuse to form a chimera, did god dock one the embryos a soul or do we end up with a person with two souls?
How does Heaven cope with the huge population of dead embryos sloshing around the feet of the Lord in perfect communion? What kind of person is the soul of a dead embryo, a thing with no brain and no sensory connections and no ability to communicate and no life experience or memory?
Clearly, AIG needs to respond quickly as my soul(s) are in danger.
And they’re still trapped in dualist thinking. If you actually could “transfer the human mind from one substrate to another”, that implies there’s something to the mind separate from the substrate.
I can see creationists having problems with AI.
“I am the Eschaton.
I am not your god.
I am descended from you
and exist in your future.”
If my mind is cloned, does that entail I can be at two places simultaneously?
Not really, unless there was a way for you and your clone/copy to re-merge, and thus have two sets of memories afterword. Not sure how anyone could ever do that in any way that doesn’t fry, overload or otherwise destroy your brain…
About that left-hand graph – it has only a single line of evolutionary progress, leading to humans. Looks like some “Ladder of Evolution” BS.
They’re talking about Mind Uploading. Not precisely a common technology in sci-fi, but it sees some representation – see Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief, series, for example, where pretty much all the characters are mind uploads running around in synthetic bodies.
In terms of real world technology, they’re still at the ‘Well, if we slice a brain into real thin wafers, image them, and then use a computer to compile that information into a simulation, maybe we can upload a mind.” “Okay, great! Where do we get imaging capability that good?” phase.
Jeff L @ 13
But it would remove the need for a trinity if you think of “mind” or “soul ” as informational.
God Prime downloaded a small component of itself into an organic, human chassi. After the chassi perished the resident mind fragment was uploaded again.
In this context, the “father” would be programs concerned with the “anthroprocentric” things related to humans and the “holy ghost” related to more abstrakt things like keeping the expansion of the universe just right.
I am almost, but not quite, tempted to rethink my atheism, because that ‘As such’ in the first quote seems to be doing a supernatural amount of work, beyond the bounds of human comprehension. . .
Angle @ 17
The first mention of mind upload I found was in an unremarkable SF novel by Clifford Simak titled The Werewolf Principle mainly concerned with morphing the body to fit the environment.
A more fun example was in William Gibson’s Idoru.
Mind cloning? It sounds like AIG has become vaguely aware of transhumanism. Ray Kurzweil and the singularity. Elon Musk and his mind – machine interface. Dreams of uploading our minds to a vast computer net work to achieve technological immortality.
BTW
a biological path to extreme life span is germ-line GM : Bowhead whales can live more than two centuries so improving the mammal self-repair capacity IS possible (If a prospect for the distant future).
A path to bona fide immortality (barring accidents) is cybernetic:
A general.intelligence would be able to swap substrates and even clone itself.
bcw bcw @ 5
I would think that rhythm would be “The Fifth Dimension”
And our personalities are more than just our brains. Hormones and other parts of our bodies have real effects upon who we are.
Didn’t you get the memo? Were you too busy eating babies or something?
See, it’s true that there are some who attempted it, but then one of them spilled bong water all over the apparatus, ruining the very delicate experiment. What a disaster that was. They’re still looking for more funding at this juncture.
If that were so, that would mean that they must remain identical despite being in different environments, which is not necessarily so. They could (hypothetically) start in the same state at some time, but (if we’re going to start being at least a little realistic) they would not just be stuck that way permanently no matter what happens to the two individuals at any other time.
Yeah, just look at Star Trek. They’re all killing themselves every time they use the transporters, which are really just fancy copying machines, but they don’t seem to have a general problem with valuing the lives of humans and other sentient beings like aliens, androids, holograms, etc.
They probably should stop using their transporters though (and lying to everyone about what they do)…. Okay, fine, Star Trek is not such a good example.
Creation (they could say) is a continual process, not something that only happened in the distant past, since God is always doing little miracles and intervening with one thing or another. Because if God weren’t doing that, then everything would run out of steam and/or fall apart.
So, the x-axis could be something like days modulo 7, for instance.* God could work on dogs for some period once per week (starting at 5:47am on Tuesdays, let’s say) and while he’s still trying to finish up fiddling with them, he’s also gotten started fussing around with humans (for a somewhat longer period of time, since that disc is larger).
However, he does not work on horses at the same time as either dogs or humans. Of course not. That would be bad. You’re not supposed to cross the streams like that. But cats+horses is totally fine, obviously.
*It could also be some other period of time. Maybe God only bothers to mess around with things every 1,000 years or maybe it’s every nanosecond. It hardly matters, since none of this ever detectable in any way.
The soul is an open disc,* which exists somewhere in space, although we don’t know exactly where that is — possibly Florida or Uranus or both, possibly somewhere else. (We’re still working on it.) Also, it’s a uniform gray on the inside, although it’s not tangible and doesn’t actually reflect any light. Everybody knows that.
*Clearly, discs are very important in this cosmology (possibly because they’re easy to make in Microsoft Word). I’m not sure why God creating is a regular disc with a boundary while souls are open. But no doubt he works in very mysterious ways, so perhaps we’re just not meant to understand such things.
Not even Musk or Epstein? I definitely imagine one or both having at least attempted it.
Ok, I did the math. From the soul graph. Amazingly all 3 variables work out to 42.
Also it’s only 266 days till towel day. That’s only 4 blocks from the Beast!
Whoa!
Just came across this by coincidence – transferring animal neurones into human brains!
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02073-4
Sorry, human neurones into animals – but either way, relevant to AI and to the nonsense about non-existent souls.
But at least a couple of mad scientist types have switched people’s personalities. Interesting little side effect: not only does the personality and memories get transferred to the new body, but the speaking voice gets transferred as well.
At least, that’s how it worked on Gilligan’s Island. I don’t remember if it worked that way on The Flintstones; that will require further research, I guess.
I am guessing those who think that the mind is an experience that results from the entire body doing things, not just the brain, are right.
I suspect a disembodied brain, even if supplied with oxygen, nutrients, and sensory experiences, would not exhibit a sane mind. They would be more like Johnathan Cage, the man who had a spike go through his skull, and lived. While his brain still worked (after he recovered from a raging wound infection), he never again was what we think of as a functioning human being. Since then many patients have turned up with similar lesions in the frontal cortex, from strokes or tumors, and they exhibit similar behaviors, or rather lack of behavior.
In a sense then AIG are right – the mind extends past the brain. Where they’re wrong is that the mind is not material.
Making s*** up, sci-fi style, is their specialty.
Heh. That’s wrong, but it has the same cadence and rhyme as Phineas Gage.
(Minds, or possibly brains, are funny things)
“Men die, cattle die.
Someday, you too will die.
One thing lives forever,
World fame.”
Ozymandius would like a word.
@25 “However, he does not work on horses at the same time as either dogs or humans. Of course not. That would be bad. You’re not supposed to cross the streams like that. But cats+horses is totally fine, obviously.”
Don’t you mean “Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!”
DanDare,
Ah yes, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).
Evidently, his fame is still remembered, even if only by proxy.
“I don’t think anyone has even tried to transfer a human mind to a different substrate. I don’t even know how you would start to do such a thing, because the mind is inextricably intertwined with the brain.”
I was trying to write an SF action adventure mystery, only to learn I’m not good at mystery writing, but part of the plot hinged basically on this very premise and I did work out a way to do it. It requires creating an artificial neural net fabric and wrapping the brain in it. In the story, this was done to treat neurodegenerative diseases by giving the brain a “healthy” set of neurons to transfer funtionality to. One thing that he was happened in the story was that ALL functionality was transfered in an individual and their actual organic brain atrophied to nothing. We are likely a century or more from that being possible. But if you want to know how it might work, there’san answer.
heartwood, thing is, a brain is 3D and a wrapping is in contact only with the surface of the brain.
(Also, there’s a thing called the brainstem)
Actually, Helge made a very good point; what I call “the juices”.
Those pesky hormones and sugars and electrolytes and oxygen and stuff.
—
Also: https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Mi-go_Brain_Cylinder
@Owlmirror – thanks for that correction. I knew I should have checked that.
@John Morales – not just hormones etc but muscles, like the gut and the heart. There is no tiny pilot sitting in your head, not even metaphorical. You are you – all of you.
It means of course that people who lose a part of themselves are irrevocably changed. I know from wearing hearing aids that prostheses never restore what we were.
Helge, indeed.
(You — whether knowingly or not — allude to the homunculus argument; who pilots the pilot? ;) )
Well, Ozymandia</>s is apparently a Greek name for the Egyptian pharoah Ramases II (r. 1279–1213 BCE), so his fame has lasted more than 3,200 years so far – although it can’t have been “World fame”, strictly speaking, until a few centuries ago, and even now, presumably, he’s unknown to the Sentinelese. That aside, 3200 years is still long way from forever, but maybe his fame will last forever, although no-one could ever truthfully say “OK, now it’s lasted forever”. Conversely, we can’t give specific examples of those who were once famous, but are now completely unknown – and if the once-but-no-longer-famous are known, even if the only to a few specialists, we can’t be certain they won’t become famous again in future!
Sorry, @42 only the second “a” in “Ozymandias” should have been italicised!
Speaking of mind/brains/souls, and mind simulation, one of the ideas that I came up with a while back was that if you posit that God exists as conventionally conceived (immaterial, immortal, knows everything), you don’t really “need” an immaterial and immortal soul as well, because God is immaterial and immortal, and God’s perfect knowledge of everyone is sufficient to recreate everyone, or even simulate everyone.
I suggested that to Heddle, quite a few years ago now. I don’t recall his exact response, but it was probably something along the lines of “I’ll have to think about that”, and nothing further.
Actually, it would be fun if Cserhati’s mind clone turned out to be a godless liberal.
JeffL@13:”… that implies there’s something to the mind separate from the substrate.”
Which reminds me of an internet loon arguing years ago for something or other that I forgot about. Its response to someone questing it dubious claim was “listen to what your brain is telling you”, as though your brain and your thoughts were somehow completely independent. My brain is telling me that all ignorant idiots are merely ignorant idiots.
Also, AIG talking about “intelligence” always results in this problem:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/692/19789999.jpg