Michio Kaku: Could We Transport Our Consciousness Into Robots? | Big Think

Robin, you ask yet another very embarrassing question. Believe it or not even though tens of thousands of papers have been written about consciousness in the literature nobody has a suitable definition for "consciousness." What does it mean to be conscious and how do you encode it and what is the minimum amount of consciousness necessary to animate something else? This raises questions for artificial intelligence because some people in the field of AI believe that one day we will be immortal; we will live forever. But the question is what will live forever? The atoms that make up our body, that give us consciousness, that give rise to our personality and our fears and desires—that may die, but yet the essence of the neural circuits may survive. Now there are many ways to do this, so let’s break some of them down. The most ambitious has been proposed by people who believe that one day we will create a robot body that is perfect, a Superman, beautiful, elegant, super-powerful body with no brain. Then we will start to extract our brain tissue neuron-for-neuron and duplicate it with transistors. So for every neuron we take out of our brain we replace it with a transistor. Sooner or later chunks of our brain are removed and inserted transistor-for-transistor inside this robot body. Now we’re fully conscious during this process. Part of our brain computes here and part of our brain computes over there connected by wires. Well, after a few hours large portions of the brain are gutted and huge chunks of transistors are added to this robot of silicon and steel and when it’s finally finished you now have no brain in your head and here is a robot with a complete brain and a complete body. That is one of the most ambitious ways to transfer consciousness from our body to another body and then the question is: is that really you? Well there is another way to do it and that way was explored in "The Sixth Day" with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In that movie the bad guys get killed, but each bad guy was cloned, cloned. And somebody was able to somehow photograph all the memories of our brain and insert these memories into the clone. Now we don’t know how to do that, obviously. That is way beyond our technology, so don’t expect Arnold Schwarzenegger to come back fully-formed, with all his memories, as a clone. That is not going to happen anytime soon. However, the initial steps are once again being made at CalTech for example. They’ve been able to take a mouse brain and look at a certain part of the brain where memories are processed. Memories are processed at the very center of our brain and they’ve been able to duplicate the functions of that with a chip. So again, this does not mean that we can encode memories with a chip, but it does mean that we’ve been able to take the information storage of a mouse brain and have a silicon chip duplicate those functions. And so was mouse consciousness created in the process? I don’t know. I don’t know whether a mouse is conscious or not. But it does mean that at least in principle maybe it’s possible to transfer our consciousness and at some point maybe even become immortal.

Channel: Big Think

Views: 672,266

Rating: 4.912591 out of 5

Keywords: bigthink, 5min, Big Think, BigThink, BigThink.com, Michio, Kaku, Michio Kaku, physics, physicist, theoretical physicist, consciousness, teleportation, Robin de Roover, artificial intelligence, AI, immortality, transferring consciousness, michio kaku consciousness, consciousness transfer, mind uploading, transfer consciousness, michio kaku big think, big think michio kaku, robots, human consciousness, artificial consciousness, transfer consciousness to another body, uploading consciousness

Id: tT1vxEpE1aI

Length: 3min 39sec (219 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Nepycros]

If a personality is transferred into a robot, that robot will act as if it is a conscious individual. But that is indistinguishable from a really sophisticated AI that is not preceded by a human consciousness. This only provides evidence that a human consciousness/personality can be duplicated. Not necessarily that there is a literal transfer (because no physical process can 'transfer' consciousness, but physical processes can duplicate the patterns of matter, and this will one day extend to our brains).

Rather than 'transfer', it would be much better to start off with wholesale duplication. Make an atomically precise and perfectly mirrored human brain, plug it into a body, and see if both the original and the copy behave similarly. If so, that indicates that a personality is maintained by the brain state, which is a physical pattern.

[u/ThisBWhoIsMe]

gruesome warning

This is about a real crime. The son sneaks into the house in the middle of the night and axes his father and mother in their sleep.

The father was hit in the head many times with the axe. The outer part of his brain was destroyed, but the inner part, automation, functioned for a while. The father got up and got dressed, and went down and made breakfast (cereal), and walked out and got the paper, and then fell dead.

Also, when the father went out to get the paper he accidentally locked the door behind him and had to use his keys to get back in the door.

He was conscious enough to handle routine scenarios, but wasn't conscious of his condition and the blood all over him.

That says something about consciousness, but I don't know what.

[u/AeonThoth]

/r/Futurology

[u/nomenmeum]

If I were to be downloaded, I would have existed before my synthetic brain and after my organic one and would, therefore, be something demonstrably distinct from either brain.

[u/cl1ft]

This is the fallacy of materialism.

The existence of the mind/consciousness should make all materialists doubt their worldview.

The two scenarios presented are that the essence of our consciousness is only found in the grey matter of our brains or the essence of our consciousness is simply the sum collection of our memories.

The latter point is patently false, our consciousness allows us to operate and create memories. The mind is in existence at birth.

To me its extremely frustrating to listen to people who only believe in particles try to explain how particles can create stories. That's the absurdity of materialism.

[u/ChristianConspirator]

This amounts to hypotheticals that intrinsically assume consciousness comes from brains. But it does sound a bit like the first argument in Plantinga's Against Materialism.

Of course, the second argument and others conclusively show that it's irrational to suppose (like Dr Kaku apparently does) that consciousness can come from brains.