Big Bots Don't Cry

A few comments to last week's post Computers Don't Want suggested that human brains are just advanced computers, yet still possess agency and desires. But are we just Turing machines? I wrote about this question before but let's revisit in the world where artificial general and super intelligence may (or may not) be right around the corner. 

Much of what our brain does, the way we store and retrieve our memories, how we process our senses, how we reason and learn, are very much computational. There is something else, something that gives us an internal view of ourselves, that combined with the computational power of the brain leads to self-awareness, agency, free will, emotions and desires. When I see attempts to give computational explanations for our internal concepts, like the Blums' work on consciousness and free will, I see them capturing the properties we attribute to these concepts, but fail to capture the intuitive notion I have of them. I have some internal capability, a "soul" for the lack of a better name, that allows us to reason about ourselves.

I think of René Descartes and his Meditations on First Philosophy, famous for cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) in the second meditation. Computation and even its execution are mathematical concepts and mathematics lies outside of any physical world. You can't reason from a computational object that it exists. Yet Descartes is able to reason about his own existence. In the sixth meditation, Descartes talks about substance dualism, a separation from mind and body. I view the body as containing the brain, the computational part of our being, but some other entity which, combined with our powerful computational brain, enables us to reason about ourselves and gives us free will, emotions and desires. 

I met a religion professor and asked him about this topic. He mentioned that he had a crying baby sitting next to him on the plane to Chicago. Babies cry for many reasons but sometimes just to be held by their mother or father, a need for companionship. I can imagine a computer doing the equivalent of crying but not the need to do so.

I can't explain how the soul interacts with our brains, I suspect it goes beyond some simple physical mechanism. I can't prove that I have a soul, and while I can't prove the rest of humanity also has souls, I believe they do since otherwise we wouldn't even have concepts like self-awareness. But I don't believe AI models, now or in the future, have something like a soul, and we shouldn't reason about them as though they do.