| | I was also thinking about Buddhism and how it meshes with AI, especially the idea that we could transfer our consciousness to a computer. For me, this was sparked by the recent Times magazine front-cover article about this whole immrtality-through AI idea.
So to my mind there are a few ways of looking at this. On the one hand, Buddha says a sentient being is really just an arbitrary aggregation of various impersonal processes that comes to mistakenly view itself as a unified entity - a random meaningless little shape cut out of the seamless fabric of reality, which by virtue of being cut so comes to have the idea that it is a meaningful thing that is actually separate form the rest of the fabric.
So from this standpoint, whether that collection of processes is housed in an organic structure, and the thoughts it experiences are the result of analog chemical reactions in the brain, or it's housed in an electronic structure and the thoughts come from digital circuit-boards, makes very little difference in terms of definition. If one is a human being, why not the other? If one is only a machine", why not the other? Either way, what you actually have is just a bunch of nothing that thinks it's something... so to speak.
On the other hand, I do wonder whether, if we someday can transplant all of our memories and brain-structures that constitute our mental being in it's entirety into the digital realm, losing the limitations of a human body, the resultant being would be capable of practicing Dharma. Of course such a being would never be truly immortal - all things are impermanent, after all. But the new being would probably believe that it has completely escaped death, so what would be the need for Dharma? Additionally, the new being, by virtue of the fact that all of its experience now comes through some sort of digital version of the sense media, would probably be capable of "controlling" its own experience to the point where it does not feel any of the 'course suffering' (physical pain, painful emotions, whatever) that drives people to the Dharma.
The last point though, brings up some interesting conclusions. The end-point of Dharma is to learn the true nature of the mind, to understand experientially how all phenomena are the products of the mind, no? So from a certain perspective, transplanting your mind to a computer would almost be like an instant and effortless version of this enlightenment, or at least a version of the practical results of such an enlightenment: one would no longer be bound by external conditions, one would be capable of perfectly unconditional happiness because one would have complete control over what enters into ones mind.
For example, imagine an algorithm embeded into the "sensing" software for such a digital-mind. It could filter out awareness of anything that impinges on one's happiness - from bad news to visual ugliness.
The thing is, I'm highly skeptical that any digital medium, no matter how sophisticated, could ever truly replicate the analog workings of an organic human mind. Perhaps some kind of chemical-digital hybrid, where the chemical mechanisms of the physical brain (synapses and stuff like that) could be actually grown in a lab and then transplanted to some sort of environment where they can live indefinitely? Or maybe you could actually just surgically take out somebody's brain and hook it up to machines that keep it alive forever. But an all-digital replacement for an organic brain? It seems unlikely to me. |