I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss.
Thus spoke amateur rock climber Heinz Pagels, the real-life inspiration for mathematician Ian Malcolm in Michael Critchon’s Jurassic Park novels, about a recurring nightmare he had been having. If continuity of consciousness could some day be guaranteed through software or hardware backups of the mind, risky sport, like climbing, might become a lot more popular. Mind uploads and copies, conscious machine intelligences and connectomes are the kinds of things that keep a man like Ray Kurzweil up at night.
With the publication of his 2005 book, “The Singularity is Near,” Kurzweil single-handedly mainstreamed the concept of a technological singularity. Presumably, when the singularity is reached, machine intelligence will have attained human-level equivalence and therefore be capable of consciousness. The future fate of humanity would at this point become unpredictable, then unknowable. Kurzweil’s estimation for the singularity to begin in less than 30 years has raised eyebrows — and controversy. With his newly released book “How to Create a Mind,” Kurzweil seeks to better ground his former work, and in the process takes stock the current state-of-art in brain mapping, machine intelligence, and how we came to be where we are today.
Among its many gems, Kurzweil’s new release looks to define ways in which the human brain will overcome its limitations by either merging with, or being downloaded to, the hardware of our machines. The most palatable option would be to expand the natural architecture of the brain, augmenting it by sharing resource with the the cloud of the future through appropriate interface. The more daring option would be for future minds to abandon flesh and blood hardware, resolving instead to neuromorphic hardware or to software running on more traditional computing elements.
In an incident disturbingly similar to his dream, Pagels fell to his death in 1988 while climbing Pyramid Peak in Colorado. Perhaps even more poignant, his last published work, “Complexity as Thermodynamic Depth,” serves as the first clear articulation as to why a human consciousness will never be “dragged and dropped” in the manner of copying a piece of software and uploading it to a machine. Like his Jurassic Park counterpart, Pagels strove to understand what makes complex systems so complex. He formalized the notion that copies that are easy to create are not very “deep,” as brains are systems that are neither completely ordered nor completely random.
Consider, for example, a box containing two hard drives, each with Windows 8 installed. One might then ask how much more complex is this box, then a box containing just a single Windows 8 hard drive? If complexity is defined as thermodynamic depth — essentially a measure of how hard it is to put something together from elementary pieces — then the answer would be not that much. On the other hand, a box containing both Jayne and Joan Boyd, the original Doublemint Twins of Wrigley’s fame, would have roughly double the thermodynamic depth of a box containing just Joan.
Next page: The ever-changing nature of the brain…
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