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Jihad of the Heart – episode 1

“Jihad” is a story/thought experiment about our legal system coming to grips with restorative life insurance.  What happens to someone who is charged with a crime committed by his later self?  It is also about the Canadian immigrant experience, a few years down the road.

It’s Canada Day.  But he and Laila are not at any of the usual patriotic festivities—they wander the heat-softened asphalt of the Playland midway breathing vivid airs of onion rings, candy floss and puke.  They don’t speak, except with clasped hands and their eyes—of lying entangled and sticky on sun-struck sheets, that long holiday morning.  The Maple Leaf snaps overhead.  Hucksters lean from booths offering three balls, knock down the jugs and win a bear for her—Javeed waves them off, knowing the game is fixed.  Now she points to something she wants—a flailing horror of cartoon teacups.  He laughs—“No, Laila!  My stomach won’t stand it.  Let’s try that one” —the ferris wheel, stately benches rising into the blue view in which lovers can lose themselves.  But she has pulled away.  A carny opens a door and she almost collapses into the arms of Canadian strangers.  The machine starts up, leaving him, Javeed the engineer, inspecting the mechanism, greased rods and pistons blackly abused.  A bolt is loose. “Laila!”  She spins up, and then he knows—but cannot watch her fly off the handle.

Javeed finds himself on his back under a light blanket, full of panic that begins to fade as he sorts out dream from reality.  On his cot in the Detention Centre.  Again.  How many times has he woken, in just one night, to find himself here?  The light is too bright.  He understands why they keep a light on.  But why so bright?

The first of how many nights?

The first and only!  He did nothing wrong.  This is Canada, not Tehran; not the hell-hole of Guantanamo either.  Canada is a country of peace, as he learned in immigration class, and good government—and a third thing, order—gentle and tolerant, welcoming of newcomers.  The lawyer will return and explain everything at tedious length.  There will be apologies all round.  They will let him go home.  Let him go…where?  He heard his address had changed.   Home to what, exactly?

They said he was charged with….  “That’s insane!  You’re talking about my wife and my friend!”  But it’s useless to argue with the police. Continue reading “Jihad of the Heart – episode 1”

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Persons in Law

We cannot understand the self by examining people in isolation.   Too many important aspects of personhood only appear in a social context.

Thomas Metzinger’s work describes the self-model in which our ideas about ourselves are rooted.  The model is (usually) transparent, in that we operate through it without (usually) any awareness of a distinction between the model and the underlying reality.  It is a model to which we have a profound emotional attachment—most of us care, deeply, about ourselves in the past, present, and future.  As a result, our self-models are motivational.  They spur and shape our actions.  We evaluate possible courses of action by putting our self-models through various simulations, and responding emotionally to the different outcomes we imagine.  The research of Antonio Damasio has begun to show how our emotions must inform our executive decision-making processes in order for us to make what are commonly recognized as ‘rational’ decisions.

Most of what Metzinger and Damasio have to say about the self is as true of isolated individuals as of human beings immersed in society.  But a case can be made that the concept of the self could only have emerged in a social context.   I have argued that our concepts, particularly the entities recognized by our ontology, reflect what is important to us. The spatio-temporal boundaries between ‘things’ are artificial, not natural; they do not exist in nature, but are imposed upon nature by human beings.   A person is an entity whose boundaries roughly coincide with those of a human biological organism.  A person is commonly considered to begin sometime around birth; sooner in some traditions, later in others.  The person is usually thought to persist until biological death; but many people believe that it continues much longer than that; and some believe that if the organism is sufficiently damaged, then the person may cease to exist before its organism dies.

Among other things, a person is a unit of moral and legal responsibility—a bearer of enduring rights and privileges, duties and obligations, merits and demerits, assets and liabilities, debts and credits.  Those attributes of individual persons result from, and depend on, the fact that individuals are members of a larger society.  If a human being is isolated for a long time from other human beings, legal obligation disappears from his life, and moral obligation, if it does not entirely disappear, is vastly curtailed.  I would not go so far as to say that an isolated human being ceases to be a person; only that certain central and important aspects of personhood simply disappear from his or her life.  Having moral and legal rights and obligations is a central and important aspect of personhood. Continue reading “Persons in Law”

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Is the Google Car Conscious? Ethics and Artificial Minds

As a software developer, I am attracted by Thomas Metzinger’s functional level of description because it can be read as a high-level functional specification for consciousness and the self.  If someone could build an artificial system that meets the specification, he or she would have created a conscious being!   That would certainly be an interesting project.  Perhaps having a philosopher write the functional spec is exactly what’s called for to rescue AI from the back-eddies in which it has slowly revolved for several decades.

Although computers have made impressive progress in competing with human beings—advancing from checkers to chess championships, winning at trivia games and outperforming human experts in knowledge of specific domains—this success is due more to faster hardware, improved search techniques, and truly massive storage than to breakthrough advances in software architecture.  Yes, software can ‘learn,’ by using feedback from its own failures and successes to modify its behaviour when attempting similar problems in the future.  Yet the holy grail of AI, the Turing Test—to pass which a computer must be able to successfully masquerade as a human being by carrying on a convincing conversation with human interlocutors who are trying to tell the difference—still seems as distant a goal as it did when Alan Turing proposed it in 1950.  It is likely to remain so until we develop machine analogues of consciousness and emotion, by which I mean emotions both of self-concern and of concern for others. Continue reading “Is the Google Car Conscious? Ethics and Artificial Minds”

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Metzinger on the Unreality of the Self

In the last chapter of Being No One, Thomas Metzinger addresses the questions with which he introduced the book, a list that includes:

What is phenomenal selfhood?  What, precisely, is the nonconceptual sense of ownership going along with the phenomenal experience of selfhood, or of “being someone”?

In the discussion, he makes a striking comment related to the reality of the self.  If the phenomenal self-model (PSM) is “of a nonhallucinatory kind”:

…the system then represents certain aspects of reality as being parts of itself, and it does so correctly.   What it achieves is not only self-experience but self-knowledge. (Metzinger 2004, p 607)

In reading this passage, I wondered how Metzinger can reconcile it with his claim that ‘no such things as selves exist in the world.’   Here he says that the system represents itself to itself  by means of its PSM, and that it does so “correctly.”  Metzinger certainly admits that systems exist.  Are we not, then, such systems? Continue reading “Metzinger on the Unreality of the Self”

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A Special Form of Darkness: Metzinger on Subjectivity

Our brains represent ourselves, to ourselves, by means of a Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM).  According to Thomas Metzinger, the PSM is characterized by transparency, and a phenomenal quality of ‘mineness.’  Its transparency consists in our unawareness of it as a model.  We look and act ‘right through it’ – we take our models for our real selves.  ‘Mineness’ is a quality that infuses all of our experience which we take to be experience of ourselves.  Although Metzinger uses the terms “mineness” and  “ownership,” it is more than an experience of ownership.  I think “me-ness” aptly captures what Metzinger is after. Continue reading “A Special Form of Darkness: Metzinger on Subjectivity”

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Metzinger: Being No One

Being No One is a substantial work by German philosopher Thomas Metzinger about “consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective.”  Its main thesis “is that no such things as selves exist in the world.  Nobody ever was or had a self.”

I have spent some time with the book, making, from its 634 densely-printed pages, 104 pages of notes.  After all that, I still question Metzinger’s ‘main thesis.’  But I have no doubts about the value of the book.  It irrevocably raises the standard for what philosophy of mind must explain.  In its early pages, Metzinger echoes Paul Churchland’s complaint, that “theoretical approaches to the mental, still intuitively rooted in folk psychology, have generated very little growth of knowledge in the last twenty-five centuries.”  Being No One goes a long way towards burying that era. Continue reading “Metzinger: Being No One”

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Rationality and its Limits

Rationality depends on emotion.  A.R. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error – Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain reveals how the human ability to make rational, prudent choices fails unless it is supported by normal emotional responses.  His findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom which portrays emotions as enemies to reason – impulsive forces which urge us to make poor choices, and which must be held in check by cool logic and deduction.

Damasio shows that rational behaviour results from a bottom-up process that begins with subconsciously learned emotional responses that can be detected in galvanic skin responses (GSR’s), and other physical signs.  This unconscious learning preceeds, and helps to facilitate, cognitive learning.

Moreover, people require these learned emotional responses to make rational, self-interested choices, even after they have cognitively ‘figured out’ what choices are in their interests.

Both results seem counterintuitive, the latter most strikingly.  Most people who consider themselves sane think that if they know what is in their best interests, they will choose accordingly.  They won’t, says Damasio, unless that knowledge is supported by feeling. Continue reading “Rationality and its Limits”

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Human Replication Technology, Update 2010: Replicating the Brain

Successful replication of a mature human brain – one that we would accept as a replacement for our own, or for the brain of someone we love – must preserve almost all the connections within it.  Connections embody the psychological properties that make human individuals who they are: memories, learned abilities, habits, associations, talents, and emotional responses.

In an organ such as the liver, it doesn’t matter that two particular cells are adjacent, because the liver is not a communications network.  In the brain, the physical arrangement of individual cells matters very much.  All our psychological attributes – the differences between the minds of an Einstein and a Hitler – are instantiated in that physical relationship. Continue reading “Human Replication Technology, Update 2010: Replicating the Brain”

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Human Replication Technology, Update 2010: Bioprinting

My original post on technologies of human replication, a year ago, was mostly about numbers.  I estimated that a ‘fair copy’ of a human being, functionally indistinguishable from the original, could be constructed from approximately 1016 bits of information.   That’s a petabyte – a lot of data by today’s standards, but not mind-boggling.  One petabyte = 1024 terabytes (Tb).  The going price for a 1 Tb hard drive today is $70 retail; 1024 of them would cost $71,680 (less with volume discounts).  By Moore’s Law, that cost should drop to 0.7 cents by 2056.  In that time-frame, other technologies required for human replication will have matured.  As I argued, the business case for developing such technologies is compelling.  Three business drivers – applications where the economic benefits justify the required R&D – are transportation, health, and life insurance.

Some implications of the transportation and life insurance applications have already been discussed in the Phantom Self blog.  Information-based teleportation –human replication as a means of transportation – is a game-changer for the transportation industry, but will not, by itself, turn society upside down.  Travelling to Omaha as a stream of data will quite naturally become the usual way of doing business.   The use of this technology for life insurance – restoring people from backups, after they have died – is more radical, because it changes our relationship to death.  Death will be transformed from the ultimate loss to a temporary setback, like the setback called ‘death’ in a video game.

I haven’t said much about health applications.  But in the medium-term future, health care looks like the biggest driver of all.  Health care costs in developed nations are escalating towards fiscal crisis.  According to the 2007 Commonwealth Study, the United States spends 16% of its GDP on health care – triple the percentage it spent in 1960.  The trend shows no signs of abating.  Average age in the developed world continues to rise, and annual health care costs increase with the age of the patient.

We need to do things better.  An interesting development in health care technology, directly related to human replication, is organ printing. Continue reading “Human Replication Technology, Update 2010: Bioprinting”

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Engaging with the Future

Our investments in the future do not stop paying dividends when we die.  Other beneficiaries may cash the cheques, but that does not represent a loss to ourselves, because our connections to them are not fundamentally different from our connections to ourselves during our remainder of our lifetimes.  In that way, it’s as though someone else always cashes the cheques.

In practice, this means we need not hold all our future eggs in one basket.  We have no reason to invest only in ourselves.  It is no less rational to work towards goals that benefit other people, or the non-human world, than it is to work for our own benefit.  They may be goals for places far outside our homes, and for times following our personal deaths.  We can commit ourselves to goals at future times when there will be no one alive for whom we now feel full-blown self-concern.  Like Terry Fox, we can engage with a future in which we will no longer exist. Continue reading “Engaging with the Future”