Chapter Seven - V. Apropos of Embodiment

V.I

Wrye Sententia writes:

“Even as researchers nod to the complex inter-workings of biological and chemical systems of the brain and central nervous system, they still frequently disappoint in making experimental leaps of faith that reduce the higher cognitive functions of the brain to normed, discrete, measured units (voxels) without regard to resolution limits of technologies measuring blood flow in the brain, nor with recognition of the broader cultural and linguistic limitations of their own experimental methods when testing on diverse human subjects”.¹⁹

V.II

Immaculate transcription of consciousness pre-supposes preternatural self-awareness on the part of programmers but fails in any case because dis-embodiment is “lossy” – it is impossible to abstract the human qualities which have evolved in synergy with and as an emergent property of embodied being, just as it is impossible for us to sincerely adopt the morals of a species which would subjugate these qualities.

V.III

Human consciousness is an emergent property of digital processing, but also our analogue processing – the endocrine system, for instance.²⁰ Put another way, our rational understanding of the world is complemented by our subjective understanding, which is derived from our emotional life.

Neural activity depends on blood flow and the action of hormones. Our physical arousal and the strength of our feelings determine the nature of our thoughts, and thus our conditioned responses.

The endocrine and nervous systems of many animals may be almost as evolved as our own, resulting in a capacity to feel and suffer, at a primal level, almost as we do. Still in animals there is no complementarity between objective and subjective understanding – we feel less compunction in effecting their destruction because they have limited premonition of being slaughtered and limited ability to reason about the future. An AI entity which is devoid of feeling might have a premonition of its own demise but would not be perturbed by the premonition, so we would feel no more compunction in effecting its end.

V.IV

In The Human Situation lecture series, Aldous Huxley speaks about how much of an individual's outlook can be predicted by his physical constitution.²¹ To the extent this is so, an individual at the time of his upload to a digital substrate would struggle to reconcile information passed through his new sensory interface, with his intuitions, which are informed by biologically-mediated memories and perceptions.

Even if memories could be transposed intact onto a new substrate mediating for the same consciousness, it would be difficult to feel as though the memories had really been lived: the memories would have been formed while the consciousness was mediated through a different interface and was differently embodied.

And an AI created via whole-brain emulation would inherit motivations which aren't viable for a non-corporeal being. A corporeal presence might be demanded to give expression to the basic desires which evolved in tandem with its rationality, or else it would employ a motivation structure that we as embodied, partly analog, beings scarcely recognize.

V.V

In his conversation with Eric Drexler, Ray Kurzweil stresses the importance of neurotransmitter concentrations which, being contained in structures finer than the interneural connection, would entail much more memory expenditure for their replication, were scientists ever to upload a human mind onto a digital substrate.²² Since these nets are the physical manifestation of our learning processes, failing to incorporate the connection weights and connection topology of the net would result in any transposed consciousness being infantile, or more specifically a genetical clone which is only identical to the original in its naïve, infantile condition. The mature specimen would be vastly different, it having gained life experience while dis- or otherwise- embodied. It’s feelings and thoughts would not arise from facts about its physiology – it’s interface with, and so relation to, the environment, would be completely different.

Further gains to fidelity, for example forays into the nature of “irony and envy”, betoken sophistication but also some degree of departure from human semantics.²³ Hopes for reverse engineering the brain rest on simulating the neocortex as it is at birth before the bewildering array of connections between pattern recognizers are established, allowing the artificial brain to be trained on its environment in much the same way a human mind is. But this schema is complicated by the fact that learning begins while biological development is underway; since the brain is learning from the moment in gestation when the neocortex emerges, the ‘hardware’ of the brain’s architecture cannot be easily demarcated from the ‘software’ of learned experiences. The ‘software’ is ‘hardwired’. Perhaps non-biological substrates can be developed with high enough fidelity to reproduce the neural apparatus as well as reproducing the conditions of pregnancy. But just as there is subtlety in memory residing not in a single location but across a vast multitude of simultaneously activated modules, so there is subtlety in the environmental interplay which determines the dendrite connections.

Kurzweil writes of the brain, that it “allows for significant plasticity and the restructuring of its own connections based on its experience, but these functions can be emulated in software.”²⁴ Still, the connections and connections-in-waiting between modules – set out before birth but forged only as new experiences transpire – represent eons of optimization, and variation between individuals attests to the unique features of the environment dwelt in and variance between genomes.²⁵ Even if the brain’s plasticity could be simulated, imperfect or indiscreet rendition of the novel connections and connections-in-waiting could result in incoherence, the more so if it is the fabrication of an enhanced brain which is attempted.