A robot with Anson Guthrie's voice visits Dagny Beynac. The robot is a temporary vehicle for what Dagny initially thinks of as a computer. That entity scans the room not by turning the robot's turret but by transferring its own attention between pairs of lenses in a full circle around the turret.
While Guthrie was alive, an artifact called not a computer but a neural network was built as an exact analog of his individual brain. Nanoscanners entered the still living Guthrie's nervous system. Their output was used to program that neural network. Thus, the network is conscious and reproduces Guthrie's personality and memories although not his memories to the moment of death. In fact, it remembers visiting him on his deathbed. But the network is a person, a self-conscious individual, and should be referred to by a personal pronoun.
Dagny thinks:
"What was a mind, a self, a soul, anyway?" (p. 266)
If an immortal soul were necessary for consciousness or even just for reason, then a new immortal soul would have to be created ex nihilo every time a neural network was programmed but we do not need that hypothesis.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I remain skeptical of the possibility of downloading a copy of a human personality into an artificial neural network. But I'm glad Anderson examined such ideas, despite the great difficulty they gave me. In fact, it was largely because of the HARVEST books that I stopped writing to Anderson, after 1994. I needed TIME for grokking the strange concepts he used in those books. Alas, by the time I was starting to feel ready to again write to him, Anderson was dead.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
IF an artifact can duplicate the functions of a human brain, then that artifact will be an artificial brain, therefore conscious. I do not think that there is any objection in principle to that happening.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I am skeptical of even that much. Albeit, conscious, self aware AIs seem SLIGHTLY more plausible than the downloading of human personalities into artificial neural networks.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment