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could be easily and readily tested scientifically. But we can’t pos-
tulate a consciousness detector that does not have some assump-
tions about consciousness built into it.
“Science is about objective third-party observations and logi-
cal deductions from them. Consciousness is about first-person
subjective experience, and there’s a fundamental gap there. We
live in a world of assumptions about consciousness. We share the
assumption that other human beings are conscious, for example.
But that breaks down when we go outside of humans, when we
consider, for example, animals. Some say only humans are con-
scious and animals are instinctive and machinelike. Others see
humanlike behavior in an animal and consider the animal con-
scious, but even these observers don’t generally attribute con-
sciousness to animals that aren’t humanlike.
“When machines are complex enough to have responses rec-
ognizable as emotions, those machines will be more humanlike
than animals.”
The Kurzweil Singularity goes like this: computers get better
and smaller. Our ability to measure the world gains precision and
grows ever cheaper. Eventually, we can measure the world inside
the brain and make a copy of it in a computer that’s as fast and
complex as a brain, and voila, intelligence.
Here in the twenty-first century we like to view ourselves as
ambulatory brains, plugged into meat-puppets that lug our pre-
cious gray matter from place to place. We tend to think of that
gray matter as transcendently complex, and we think of it as
being the bit that makes us
us
.
But brains aren’t that complex, Kurzweil says. Already, we’re
starting to unravel their mysteries.
“We seem to have found one area of the brain closely associ-
ated with higher-level emotions, the spindle cells, deeply embed-
ded in the brain. There are tens of thousands of them, spanning
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