Final Thoughts on the GF 2045 Conference

I ran out of battery in the middle of the last section (with the spiritual leaders), so don't have good notes on what all of them said.  However, I think I can give an overall summary.  The folks from the eastern spiritual traditions all start from a non-materialist perspective in which consciousness is primary in the universe and not necessarily tied to matter.  They claim to have extensive experience, either within their tradition, or personally, or both, in moving consciousness around.  For example, Mahayogi 'Pilot' Baba is reported to have stopped his heart for days at a time and then come back to life (see here for a sceptical take).

So they all seemed willing to credit that it was potentially feasible that western science/technology could create a technological artifact that would support a consciousness (ho hum, we've been doing similar things for centuries, was kind of the perspective).  They were much more concerned with whether or not this would be a good thing employed en-masse by westerners.  They varied in their opinions: Swami Vishnudevananda Giri seemed to be pretty gung-ho (though he cautioned that the scientists who worked on this problem would end up profoundly changed by it), but most of the rest were fairly wary.  Phagyab Rinpoche gave a very eloquent speech in which he basically said it came down to the intent of those developing the technology.  If the goal was genuinely to help reduce the suffering of all beings, then it would probably be ok, but if the main goals were self-serving (eg just for longevity) it would probably give rise to all manner of problems.

That's the part that worries me: in the end, this stuff will be delivered by the technology industry, which is run by executives and investors who are, with some honorable exceptions, overwhelmingly driven by greed and competition.  I think that's going to show in the results.

So how did the conference impact my own thinking (as exemplified here, say)?  I continue to think that machine intelligence that is functionally (ie economically) equivalent to human is on the way.  I continue to think that it's likely to take longer than 30 years to achieve in full.  I continue to think this is going to exert absolutely massive stress on society, and that we should slow down.  The conference has caused me to revise upward my likelihood that scientists will reverse engineer the brain - I was impressed that they can produce a detailed level neuronal map of an entire mouse brain already (although they still can't emulate the complete functional behavior of even the simplest nervous systems).

And I was somewhat intrigued by the quantum mechanics arguments.  I don't have time to go into detail here, but it really is true that quantum mechanics privileges the observer, in such a way that it's not quite clear how to give a quantum-materialistic account of the human brain and mind (at least unless there's been new progress on this in the last couple of decades that I don't know about).  It's not clear to me whether this means that this project is going to run into the limits of materialism in a big way, or that there's just something that we really don't understand about quantum mechanics that the physicists are going to have to fix.

I think better of Dmitry Itskov.  Holding conferences and inviting a broad range of perspectives is at least making this stuff conscious, rather than society just continuing to drive hard in this direction without really talking about where it is that we are going.  I think he deserves credit for hosting a very open discussion.