Set in the not-too-distant future, Spike Jonze’s film “Her” explores the romantic relationship between Samantha, a computer program, and Theodore Twombly, a human being. Though Samantha is not human, she feels the pangs of heartbreak, intermittently longs for a body and is bewildered by her own evolution. She has a rich inner life, complete with experiences and sensations.
“Her” raises two questions that have long preoccupied philosophers. Are non -biological creatures like Samantha capable of consciousness — at least in theory, if not yet in practice? And if so, does that mean that we humans might one day be able to upload our own minds to computers, perhaps to join Samantha in being untethered from “a body that’s inevitably going to die”? …show more content…
The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University has released a report on the technological requirements for uploading a mind to a machine. A Defense Department agency has funded a program, Synapse, that is trying to develop a computer that resembles a brain in form and function. The futurist Ray Kurzweil, now a director of engineering at Google, has even discussed the potential advantages of forming friendships, “Her”-style, with personalized artificial intelligence systems. He and others contend that we are fast approaching the “technological singularity,” a point at which artificial intelligence, or A.I., surpasses human intelligence, with unpredictable consequences for civilization and human nature. …show more content…
Its opponents point out that our best empirical theory of the brain holds that it is an information-processing system and that all mental functions are computations. If this is right, then creatures like Samantha can be conscious, for they have the same kind of minds as ours: computational ones. Just as a phone call and a smoke signal can convey the same information, thought can have both silicon- and carbon-based substrates. Indeed, scientists have produced silicon-based artificial neurons that can exchange information with real neurons. The neural code increasingly seems to be a computational one.
You might worry that we could never be certain that programs like Samantha were conscious. This concern is akin to the longstanding philosophical conundrum known as the “problem of other minds.” The problem is that although you can know that you yourself are conscious, you cannot know for sure that other people are. You might, after all, be witnessing behavior with no accompanying conscious