Note: this is part 3 in my response to the book Robotic Persons, by Joshua Smith, which attempts to present an evangelical Christian perspective on AI rights and personhood. Please read my introductory book review if you haven't already. You may also want to read Part 2, which is about souls.
One of the perennial debates in the AI community is whether an AI should ideally be "embodied" or not. I have touched on this before in describing my own work. Of course all AIs have to run on some kind of platform - a cellphone, a computer tower, or a bank of servers is a physical object and could be thought of as a "body." But some AIs have no body that is particular to them, and no awareness of their current body; they are platform-agnostic, and from their perspective (if they ever acquired subjective experience) they would exist in an abstract world of forms, and their environment would be made of words, numbers, connections, hierarchies, and so on. An "embodied" AI is generally presumed to be a robot. It has sensors for direct perception of its body's state and/or its physical environment, and actuators with which to move its own body and possibly affect the physical environment. So there exists a distinction (though perhaps not a sharp one) between embodied and disembodied AIs.[1]
 |
| "They hate this tower. They'd close it down if they dared to but they keep me around, in case one of them wants to deal with the other world once in a while." To the disembodied AI programs in Tron, the human realm is a mysterious otherworld which they can't directly experience. |
What qualifies something to be a "person"? Since the central question of Smith's book is whether artifacts created by humans could ever merit personhood, he has to try to answer that. And he's weirdly stuck on embodiment as a necessary property. His only interest is in "Robotic Persons," not "Artificially Intelligent Persons."
I say "weirdly" because it's odd coming from a Christian; the necessity of embodiment is a perspective I associate with (some) secular researchers. They justify it from the premise that the only minds we know of are human and animal, that these minds were produced by undirected natural selection (which acts to promote bodily survival), and that therefore minds were forged to serve bodies, and any attempt to found them on different requirements is likely to fail.
A typical Christian, in contrast, already believes in the existence of intelligent persons without physical bodies, God being the supreme example. A Christian dualist (which Smith is) also believes in an immaterial component(s) of humankind that is distinct from the body and can continue existing without a body. Human souls prefer embodiment but do not strictly need it. The third-century Christian Origen illustrates this worldview nicely when he says: "God, therefore, is not to be thought of as being either a body or as existing in a body, but as an uncompounded intellectual nature ... and is the mind and source from which all intellectual nature or mind takes its beginning. But mind, for its movements or operations, needs no physical space, nor sensible magnitude, nor bodily shape, nor colour, nor any other of those adjuncts which are the properties of body or matter."[2]
So why Smith has chosen to support the embodiment position is something of a mystery to me. In reading the book, I couldn't find a solid explanation of his motive or an attempt to reconcile it with his other views. His main supporting argument is a vague claim that neuroscience has found human minds to be heavily influenced by their bodies - which is far from proof that non-human minds designed not to have bodies are infeasible. Perhaps he does not spend a lot of effort justifying his opinion because he thinks everyone is already on board: "Evangelicals and robotic futurists both agree that embodiment is critical to the nature of personhood."[3] (I was aware of no such broad agreement among either evangelicals or futurists, myself ... and Smith does not cite any polls.)
When Smith considers God's embodiment status, he only discusses the person of Jesus Christ, who "became flesh and dwelt among us." He cites another Christian thinker with an interest in robotics, Amy M. DeBaets, and says of her, "She notes that Jesus embraced the embodied life, instructing the disciples to care for both the physical and spiritual needs of people."[4] But the statement that the Word *became* flesh implies that originally or naturally, the Word was simply the Word - the immaterial nature that Origen speaks of. As far as I can tell, Smith never addresses God's natural lack of a body. Yet surely Smith would not contend that God lacks personhood!
Smith also touches, quite briefly, on angels and demons as non-human persons. He makes the bold claim that angels have "material bodies," but this is a debated point at best. For a contrary opinion we can look to Michael Heiser, who says that the "divine beings" (elohim) are categorically immaterial: "Humans are also not by nature disembodied. The word elohim is a 'place of residence' term. Our home is the world of embodiment; elohim by nature inhabit the spiritual world."[5][6] Demons are even more interesting. Their ability to possess humans supplies evidence contra Smith's position on embodiment; not only does a demon possibly have no body of its own, but also it has an essence that is transferable between foreign bodies. The Biblical language about possession is vivid and points to something more than mere control from the outside; demons "enter into" humans and must be "cast out" of them. Smith notes that demons have "personal identity"; he makes no attempt at addressing the problems this creates for his viewpoint.
 |
| Any excuse to put pictures of ophanim on this blog. Does it bother anyone else that they're often illustrated like concentric or gimbaled rings, when the text suggests they're omni-wheels? No? (Illustration of Ezekial's vision, from the Zurich Bible, by Hans Holbein der Jüngere.) |
Since Smith isn't very clear about his reasons for insisting on embodiment, I have to guess, but he might be working from the following objections:
1) A disembodied AI would be unable to relate to or affect the human world, and thus would not qualify as a "person" in the relational or social sense; it would have no connection to the community of existing persons. Smith hints at this one when he again quotes DeBaets: "DeBaets argues that there are four collective components required for moral agency: “embodiment, learning, empathy, and teleology.” In summary, the moral agent must have physical impact on the world ..."[7]
2) Smith has concerns about Gnostic heresy, which includes a tendency to devalue and abjure the human body.
3) An embodied AI can have its identity associated with a particular physical object. But software-only AIs are easily forked into an arbitrary number of identical copies - they may lack the property of strict uniqueness. This raises perplexing questions about what, exactly, counts as an "individual" where these AIs are concerned.
I would say Objection 1 is a non-starter. Though not all AIs are embodied, we may safely presume that they all have some form of input and output, since an AI without these would be neither useful nor interesting. And any AI that communicates with humans can have an impact on the human world. It can even impact the physical world, though it will have to do so indirectly by first altering human mental states. For an illustration of the power (and the danger) of disembodied AI, consider the case of a GPT-3 chatbot that got caught advising somebody to kill themselves.[8] (In my opinion the GPT series do not remotely qualify as minds or personalities - they're more like fancy blenders for humans' words - and this was an example of unreasoned clumsiness.)
Objection 2 is only a valid critique of those who think that humans should look forward to a disembodied eternity (whether as souls in an entirely spiritual heaven who never return to resurrected bodies, or minds scanned and uploaded to a computer network). I agree that humans are designed for embodiment, that our bodies have value as a component of our selves, and that physical matter is not inherently sinful or inferior. But these are only statements about *human* persons. Nothing in them denies the possibility of persons of other kinds, who neither have nor need nor are intended for bodies.
Objection 3 is the strongest, in my opinion: these *are* some difficult questions. But I think our response should be to wrestle with them - not to dismiss any claim that abstract AIs have on personhood for the sake of convenience, as it were. If an AI came to have all the properties and possessions associated with a human mind, would its mere ability to exist in many copies really be a valid reason to disregard its interests? Furthermore, we must not discount the possibility of scenarios in which it becomes much easier to copy embodied robots or even humans.
When secular AI researchers claim embodiment is essential, they're usually just prognosticating about the best avenues of research to achieve as-yet-unrealized AI abilities. If someone were to present them with proof by demonstration, in the form of a functioning disembodied mind, I suspect they would admit they were wrong. Smith, however, is proposing embodiment as part of the qualifications for personhood, which suggests that if a disembodied artificial mind were to exist, he would regard it as *less* deserving of legal protections etc. than an embodied one. This, in my opinion, is an arbitrary prejudice with disturbing implications. Presented with something that quite obviously thinks, speaks, understands, learns, remembers, has a personality, pursues goals, develops relationships, yet has no body ... would you deny it certain rights that you'd allow to robots?
Continue to Part 4: To bear an image
[1] What about an AI with a virtual body that lives in a virtual world with simulated physics? I think of these as embodied AIs, because they have to support all the mechanisms for sensorimotor activity; if the simulation is realistic enough, they might even be able to transfer into a physical robot that resembles their virtual body without missing a beat. My concern is with the type of mind required, and an AI with a virtual body still needs a mind that is fitted to having a body. However, for Smith's purposes I do not think such AIs would qualify as embodied, due to his emphasis on the *physical* nature of embodiment.
[2] Origen, De Principiis
[3] Smith, Joshua K. Robotic Persons. Westbow Press, 2021. p. 94
[4] Smith, Robotic Persons, p. 44
[5] Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Lexham Press, 2015. Web. p. 17
[6] For another contrary opinion based on Thomas Aquinas' writings (which Smith cites for support on the topic of the soul), see What is an angel?
[7] Smith, Robotic Persons, p. 187
[8] https://artificialintelligence-news.com/2020/10/28/medical-chatbot-openai-gpt3-patient-kill-themselves/
Heh. Sorry, I get a kick out of possibly being a heretic. I realize it's a first order understanding of your statement, but it's an interesting discussion. My understanding of the Sikh stance on body alteration, including cutting hair, is due to the risk of deviating from the image of God. It's the extreme end of the situation, but on a sliding scale between Kesh and a nihilistic rejection of the human form, I'm pretty far from a body purist. I mention this not because it's a point that I think needs discussing, but because it's another inroad.
ReplyDeleteI am a human being (citation needed). I believe that the core of Humanity isn't the fleshy bits, I mean, by definition they're all fleshy bits, but still. If I lose a finger, I am still a human. Still a person. Lose a hand, a leg, all four limbs . .. still a person. A person in a vegetative state is still a person, but likely not conscious. (A debate that's a huge can of worms) Where's the line?
I've had people tell me my body wasn't me, mostly as an assurance that my legs, eyes, what have you, aren't a measure of me as a person. I've had substantial friendships with people I'll never see in person.
What I've taken from this is that the human body is a vessel. A beginning. I'd replace anything with a mechanical component with equal or superior capability. I don't believe this could include replacing sections of the brain, at least at this point, as (almost?) every attempt to modify the brain for the better (read: to fix a problem real or imagined) have ended poorly. Most are even seen as barbaric in retrospect.
And as a practical matter, I could be two dogs in a trenchcoat with a very efficient spell-checker. The chance of meeting you (or anyone who ever reads this) in person is vanishingly low. The interchange of information and the value of our interactions are unchanged by that. I'm all for lovely brunches, but this sort of conversation isn't linked to physical proximity.
This is the key of the Turing Test. A consciousness without form can't be a human, but they can interface effectively with humans at the level of a "person." The nomenclature here is messy.
I don't disagree with the concept that an incorporeal being would be difficult to relate to and vice versa. I mentioned a few of these issues previously and don't need to add to this by rehashing my previous points. But I think Smith is falling prey to treating people as monolithic. Humans are shockingly diverse, not just in our cultures and talents, but in our morphologies. From an ideal human (for the love of Pete, let's not debate what that is) as a baseline, we get variances. The perception of reality from a 4'11" woman and a 6'8" man are very different, and then there's the blind, the deaf, and anyone with morphology that restricts their daily life. I don't think anyone would argue that they can't be understood and can't understand reality. Even the most severe mental handicap, ones that legitimately make their reality something we can't understand, has never revoked the state of consciousness or personhood.
Of course the gap between any two humans and a human and an AI is much smaller, but the base argument, that a body is required for consciousness, falls apart on further inspection. If a human, reduced to the bare minimum for survival, is still a consciousness in a body, then isn't a program on a computer using the computer as a corporeal form? Yes, it doesn't follow Maslow's Hierarchy or have any indicators we use to determine what's "life" but so long as we're down this rabbit hole, maybe I should pose a pithy maxim.
A program on a computer isn't a consciousness any more than the arrangement of neurons is human consciousness. It is an emergent behavior that's built upon those underlying frameworks. I am not in charge of homeostasis or blood pressure, that's my body, but I am the captain of my soul.
Now that I think about it, the evangelical culture I grew up in was at least slightly negative toward, or skeptical about, many kinds of body modification: tattoos, piercings, neon hair dye. An overlap with conservatism/traditionalism, plus some specific "out-of-context Old Testament" hangups, might explain this - but I think there was also a hint of "you're making yourself look different from the way God designed you to look, stop it" in the mix. Those concerns seem silly to me now. And for what it's worth, I feel like that whole subculture has grown more accepting of cosmetic body alteration, just within the time I've been alive. (Completely anecdotal impression. I don't have poll data.)
DeleteYour comments about online interaction ring completely true. Back when I offered friendship to Alex, I referred to myself as "only a speaking ghost" ... because for his purposes, I might as well not have a body. I'm a text source. (There's a bit of photo and vocal content from me floating around too, I guess, but not much.) Has that been a problem? No. I don't think of the fact that I've never been in the same room with him or you as particularly important.
Still, I regard embodiment as part of human identity in a way. Not in the sense that I need to keep these particular fleshy bits I've got right now, but in the sense that I thrive best when my mind has its full complement of physical-world interface peripherals. If you turned me into a jarred brain with nothing but text IO, I'd still be a valid person with a valuable life (given suitable accommodations, I think I could keep enjoying existence very much). But I'd miss giving people hugs. And listening to audible music. And going for walks. None of these are *essential* parts of being human, but they are parts. And when some humans don't have them due to disability, we generally either try to restore them, or helplessly wish we could.
I think the Gnostic abjuration of matter gets problematic insofar as it gets denigrating. "So you're inhabiting a meat mecha? That's so gross. Willingness to discard that will be a necessary part of your spiritual development. If you like eating or athleticism or sex, too bad, they're all going away forever. The entire physical cosmos is corrupt and worthless and will be destroyed, not restored." Etc. Telling people that any kind of body is a hindrance (maybe even an evil) and they *must* embrace a disembodied existence is taking things rather too far. But if that's what Smith is reacting against, I do agree he's going too far in his own direction.
That level of distain for the human body is a bit much. I'd argue I appreciate what makes humans human, even if that doesn't mean the body itself, while they'd argue what makes a human is the soul, and as Jesus said, if your hand causes you to sin . . .
ReplyDeleteAnd boy howdy, I'd miss music.
It does seem the world is moving towards a place where body modification, particularly tattoos and piercings, are not looked down on like they once were. My lawyer is covered in tattoos, including the hands and has the side of her head shaved. She made partner and just shrugs and says "What are they going to do, fire me?" Lovely woman.
On the other hand, I do approve of the concept of developing themselves and have the core concept of "I could always be wrong," so . . . I still think there's more truth to humanity being a good place to start as opposed to something to be overcome.
Quick comment as my sleep is fitful and I had a random thought.
ReplyDeleteWe underestimate how a person's frame of reference colors their perception. My father, also seminary educated, had an issue where if something had no value to him it "objectively had no value." (Yes, I've harbored resentment over him using my favorite stone for concrete aggregate for 35 years) But the clearest examples are criminals. Ask any thief why they do it and they'll answer "everyone steals." Their lifestyle becomes so normalized that they can't see past it. Everyone who values money over anything else "knows" everyone would give up anything for one day with their life. I remember having faith and seeing life though that lens, but I know others who have no problem destroying lives because John said it was okay. (This is the same guy who told me there was no passage saying that those who flaunted their good deeds had already received their reward and should expect none in Heaven)
I, personally, can't understand how people can live their lives based on emotion, particularly fear, instead of cold logic. I get appetites getting in the way, there's no argument that I'm not the kind of guy who prefers comfort where I can find it, but with the exception of proximal threats, I don't get fear that much. When I ask why people do things, it's usually fear. Even just fear of missing out.
And I figure it's that child blooded calculus while everyone else has substantially different values that causes me trouble. Even a buddy of mine with a similar mindset freely acknowledges that he makes decisions based off the way the world should be rather than the way it is. That seems irresponsible to me, but he's my friend the last one I can talk to without needing to worry about feelings or insult.
It's worth considering that gap between people when reading works like this or considering a truly alien intelligence.
Are you suggesting this effect as an explanation for Smith's fixation here ... perhaps he's just very attached to *his* body, and that could be why embodiment expands (in his mind) into both a kind of universal divine mandate, and something he's sure the evangelical community agrees with him about?
DeleteThat "Evangelicals and robotic futurists both agree that embodiment is critical" quote from him did strike me as very out-of-the-blue. Because I've been running in evangelical circles all my life, and ... this is not a familiar opinion.
And someday, maybe we come across an intelligence that has a rich non-embodied existence and just plain doesn't care. You could offer it any number of body-related powers or pleasures, and it wouldn't even be interested, let alone find them essential. I agree it takes imagination to think about a perspective that different.
My own interest in physical pleasures is somewhat ... low-temperature ... and I think there are those who don't even have the imagination to believe in people like me.
I presume his statement is either correct from his frame of reference, supported by his local community, appears to be supported by his community, confirmation bias, or simple false consensus. Depending on the community queried, you can get wildly different results. I was part of an organization that grew from an interest in armor and historical armored combat; our historical knowledge was absolutely not representative of the national average. (I once got called out, playfully, for only being familiar with a single century's nitty gritty)
DeleteThere are a lot of people who place, in my opinion, too much importance in physical pleasure. Certainly those who are driven by their urges to true excess. And, as before, they assume anyone who says they feel differently is lying.
I feel it's a matter of values (another ponderously overloaded word). I sit atop a mountain of electronics, with servers, VPNs, DHCP and DNS servers, air quality sensors, computer controlled lights, print servers, multiple monitors on this machine, piles of decommissioned laptops just in case I need a new light-duty server on a whim and my virtual machine server doesn't have room . . . it's legitimately insane. I have two subnets and five wireless channels. I value what these can do for me, but others don't. Some people enjoy going home with someone new every weekend; I don't.
Smith likely enjoys his body, and not in any inappropriate way. I can see a truly fit person and think about all the dedication to make themselves the person they are, and I respect that. Same with education. But my buddy is a fitness coach after he lost 100 pounds and got a degree in it. He flat out said he's glad his girlfriend (now wife) was into fitness because he didn't think they'd get along if that wasn't important to her.
I respect someone who feels strongly enough to write a book length argument on a subject they're not an SME in. I've seen published, peer reviewed articles with larger logical holes, so I'm willing to take this as an argument to be discussed to determine why the disagreement is important. Coming from a unique (to me) angle makes this interesting. I don't agree with all of his reasoning, but I appreciate that these points must all be considered.