[FRIAM] Can a robot have a soul?

[Marcus Daniels]

There seems to be individual differences in how people have responded to the longer stretches of the pandemic.   Some people lost benefits from the “open” system.  They lost access to their friends or lost their cadence.  Other people didn’t really notice so much or even liked having the convenience of not having to run around so much.  If the Chinese did lock up Searle in a room, he would have no one to play footsie with, and maybe he would become depressed that he had no one to “charm”.   But others might not even bother to shake the door handle, and just enjoy the peace and quiet with their conniving managers at arm’s length<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/work-from-home-benefits/619597/>.

One problem I have with the decentralization-is-good slogan is that such systems may fail dramatically when the ecology changes.  For example, a classifier that is coupled to a many different “don’t care” variables via tiny weights can go haywire as soon as the distribution of the don’t care variables shifts (that is, the training set never had variation in these variables).   Better in that case to find what the don’t care variables are through some pruning algorithm.   It could go the other way too, where a resilient classifier could be built on many weak classifiers that together do meaningfully access many weak but complementary signals.

The Unix fortune cookie comes to mind: “Any given program will expand to fill available memory.”
In the minimalist view, “life” are the essential processes that keep the agent going in the locked room.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2021 7:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Can a robot have a soul?

Jochen,

The Chinese have a famous thought experiment called the  "John Searle Room" (虚构研究员, 1984).

Take the living John Searle, and place him in a sealed closed room. In a short time, he is no longer alive, has no cognition, no consciousness, and certainly no soul. Place a common conception of a robot in the same closed room (not isolated) and it will continue to function. According to Searle's Chinese Room<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/>, the robot as a mere symbol manipulator has no true cognition, no understanding. Nor does it display consciousness nor a soul.

We've come to understand living processes as necessarily open and far-from-equilibrium with "life" being a decentralized property of the system.  MIght cognition, consciousness, and soul (however defined) as higher-level properties necessarily be decentralized properties, too?

- Stephen

P.S. Didn't realize John Searle had his Emeritus status stripped from UC Berkeley for violating the Sexual Harassment policy<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/john-searle-complaints-uc-berkeley>. Frank, did you study with John Searle in the 60s at Cal?

On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 2:45 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net<mailto:jofr at cas-group.net>> wrote:
I have watched John Searle videos on YouTube today and stumbled upon the question of personality again. If we assume that there is a special substance that makes us a person, can an advanced robot or AI acquire it? Can a robot be lazy, diligent, dull, intelligent, friendly, nit-picky or even creative? John Searle would probably say it is not a good question...
https://youtu.be/Bq2bfSzkTfU

I would say the answer is yes, because if the special substance is simply the personality or persistent character of a person, there is no reason why a robot should not be able to learn a bundle of typical behavior patterns (i.e. special mappings between perceptions and actions) that are characteristic for a person, even if this behavior is implemented totally differently. The resulting personality helps to define and maintain the identity of a person
https://youtu.be/WwipmspceOU

What do you think? Is there a special substance that makes us a person, and can an advanced robot or AI acquire it?

-J.


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