The Soul of Software

Can't believe another week has gone by, and I'm still operating in this intense CPU-bound thinking mode. Thankfully, I managed to squeeze in at least 2 social engagements over the last week. Those were good sessions with friends who were also curious about many of the philosophical questions that I often write and think about. Explaining my ideas to them challenged me to think more clearly about how to articulate them in a way that is intuitive to others.

Today, I chose another mall to mull over these things: Komugi Cafe, Main Place Mall. It's another one of my favourite places because the lighting is good, and I could sit for hours here working on my coding projects over a pot of Earl Grey. Let me try to summarise some of the thoughts that have been brewing in my head over the past week.

I've written about consciousness in the past. In Consciousness Considered, I glossed over some of the challenges in tackling this subject. It could even be a non-problem, because it is simply a 'problem' that we defined into existence by labelling something as 'conscious'. 

All philosophers seem to agree that Consciousness is something subjective that we all know exists. You are conscious, reading these lines and seemingly understand what I'm trying to say. You feel things and have a sense of who you are, operating from a physical brain and body. But somehow you feel there's an interior experience that's rich and apart from the mere physicality of reality. You have a sense of 'self' or even a 'soul' or 'spirit'. And this is when we start to veer into problematic territories.  A spiritually or religiously-inclined person will start having a lot to say here. A mind, soul, spirit or consciousness simply cannot be equated with a mere physical brain. To insist that it is nothing but a piece of lumpy matter, feels incredulous, and a bit of a put-down to the spiritually inclined person.

In many religions of the world, there's something mysterious called the 'soul' that could somehow outlive the physical body. The soul could be damned or saved. It inhabits the body now, but it could live eternally somewhere else. The computationalist philosopher will then say: Isn't the soul like software running on our physical hardware? You could halt, back up and copy the entire state of your running software and then run it again on another computer. As long as the state is properly preserved, software could in theory, 'live forever'. 

The religious person would object to that and insist that the soul is what the richness of life is all about--the awe in the face of beauty, the love of one towards one's children, the connection with the universe and to something greater than that: God. How could these cold, rationalist computationalists say that the soul is like software? Software doesn't feel love, like we do. It does not experience the redness of red that I experience inside when I look at a rose. In the parlance of philosophers, software does not produce qualia.

But what makes you so sure? I've mentioned recently, in another article, The Sat-Chit-Ananda of Artificial Intelligence, that our software does not have the same kind of physiological feedback control loop that we, as biological creatures, have. An AI model does not have to worry about its own survival and thus is not threatened by anything that could 'hurt' it. But it could mimic very well, how a human would react in dangerous situations and report how it would feel panic, fear and distress when faced with the threat of extinction. 

So you say, that's just mimicry. At best, they can play the philosophical zombie. They don't feel anything inside. But hang on: we haven't equipped them with the equivalent of a nervous system and a beating heart that would modulate the functioning of their constituent parts in different situations. At the moment, we are not comparing two equivalent systems. So is AI conscious? Not yet.

Now, if the software running on a substrate (could be bare metal hardware or a virtual machine) cannot really be equated to a soul yet, would it be more similar when it is more tightly coupled with its underlying substrate, which needs to be self-maintained, fueled and regulated for optimal functioning, would it then be almost like any other sentient being? Like you?

You would insist: No! I know that I feel alive and conscious, and I enjoy a whole gamut of experiential feelings: happiness, despair, joy, pride, anger and awe. I have memories and a capacity to love and be touched by kindness, and even at times, in prayer and in sacred places, feel a spiritual ecstasy.  Don't tell me that all that is just software!

Well, what makes you so sure that it is not the effect of just blood pumping in your veins at a certain pressure, hormones secreted in the right amount at the right time, and the type of neurotransmitters flooding your brain? These would then affect and control the processing of your software (aka soul) in a tight feedback loop? The sum total of that process is what you call your 'consciousness'.

To me, life is great because we are capable of contemplating these things. I could be just software running on some substrate, but as long as I'm capable of reflecting on this possibility, I've managed to trace what Douglas Hofstadter calls the Strange Loop. In the near future, it is not inconceivable that our AI robots will also have the same existential musings: Who am I? Am I just software? Am I conscious? Do I have a soul?