“The soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body… and can exist without it”
—Descartes
Is a person simply a brain within a body? A mind in a meat-mech? A soul in a skeleton? And what does this have to do with AI?
To put it briefly: how we think about ourselves will greatly influence how we interact with AI in the coming years. Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, for instance, hopes to connect computer chips to people’s brains to bring about a human-AI symbiosis. Whether we choose to get neuralinks, and to what end they will be used for, will depend greatly on who and what we consider human beings to be.
Our modern view of the human person comes to us, philosophically at least, from Descartes. He famously declares in his writings that he is a thinking thing (a Mind) inside of an extended thing (his Body). Whereas the medievals before him regarded humans as a united composite of both body and soul, Descartes separated the immaterial part of man from the physical. Today, we similarly hold this dualistic belief that while we have a body, we are not our body. We consider our true essence instead to be something like our mind or soul or self, and we view our body as more of an organic vessel that carries around this true essence. We consider our brain to be a captain, and our body its ship. In principle, we could alter the ship, replace the ship, or even get rid of the ship entirely, and our real self could still be intact.
Here we begin to see how our view of humans can influence our approach to neuralinks. If our true essence is simply just a Mind, it matters little if we drill a hole in our skull to insert a computer chip. Altering our biological form to achieve superhuman memory is no issue, as we are simply “upgrading” our true selves. If, however, we consider our body as a fundamental and essential part of who we are—not the captain’s ship, but part of the captain himself—the idea of drilling a hole in one’s skull could raise some questions and give one pause.
Neuralink currently has two aims for its device: restoring and enhancing. The company is presently working on the former, seeking to help people with conditions such as paralysis regain motor function. In the future, however, their chip could give humans incredibly improved capacities for memory and thought, and perhaps even telepathy. Users could communicate with others merely by thinking rather than speaking. In principle as well, it may even be possible to achieve a strange sort of “immortality” with their device. By engaging in the sci-fi practice of mind-uploading, one’s thoughts and feelings could get uploaded to a computer chip, which could then be replicated or even transferred to another body when one’s original body breaks down. A digital version of one’s mind could conceivably survive indefinitely this way.
Elon Musk says that we are already cyborgs because we outsource some of our thought and memory to computers. If I may suggest here, this is one of the primary errors of our modern mind: our habit of reductionism, or reducing a thing to its parts. The Sun, for instance, is made of a bunch of particles, but that is not what it is. The Sun is, quite simply, The Sun, in-and-of-itself! A person may have a mind and body, but what they are is a person! Whole and intact! Similarly, using computers does not make us cyborgs—it is something we do, not who we are. We are, simply, people. Getting a restorative neuralink could help us become fully-functioning people. Getting an “enhancement” neuralink, however, would trigger a phase change: we would no longer be people, we would be cyborgs. By reducing the human person to simply a Mind, therefore, Descartes unintentionally laid the philosophical foundation for the replacement of humans by cyborgs. Adopting neuralinks for enhancement purposes would bring this philosophy to its logical conclusion.
Whether we choose to continue along this path is up to us. But we do in fact have a choice!
Something to ponder!