Article Science Soul AI in English for WEB 2 8 03
Alexander Bolonkin
Science, Soul, Heaven and
Supreme Mind
Advantages of Electronic being
It was shown in my previous articles about
the artificial intelligence and human immortality that the issue of immortality
can be solved fundamentally only with the help of changing a biological bubble
of a human being to an artificial one. Such an immortal person made of chips
and superstrong materials (the e-man, as it was
called in my articles) will have incredible advantages in comparison with
common people. An e-man will need no food, no dwelling, no air, no sleep, no
rest, no ecologically pure environment. Such a being
will be able to travel into space, or walk on the sea floor with no aqualungs.
His mental abilities and capacities will increase millions times. It will be
possible to move such a person at a huge distance at a light speed. The
information of one person like that could be transported to another planet with
a laser and then placed in another body.
Such people will not be awkward robots
made of steel. An artificial person will have an opportunity to choose his or
her face, body, good skin. It will also be possible for them to reproduce
themselves avoiding the periods of childhood, adolescence, as well as
education. It will not be possible to destroy an artificial person with any
kind of weapons, since it will be possible to copy the information of his mind
and then keep it separately.
I have received tons of responses and comments since my first articles about
this subject were published in 1994. Below I will try to answer the most
important ones of them.
Human soul
A lot of people, especially those, who believe in God, are certain that a
biological human being has a soul. This is something that an artificial man
will never have. No person can explain the meaning of the word soul. They
just keep saying that a human soul is not material, and that it leaves a
persons body after death and flies either to paradise or to hell. Lets try to
analyze the notion of a soul from the scientific point of view.
First of all, a soul is supposed to remember its past life, its relatives and
friends. It is also supposed to preserve its emotions to them, to care about
them and recognize them, when they come to heaven. No one would need a soul
that does not remember anything. This means that a soul is a human being
without a body. In other words, a soul is the information that is kept in a
human mind - his memories, knowledge, skills, habits, conduct programs,
emotions and feelings, ides and thoughts, and so on. If we learn how to move
this information onto other carriers, we will be able to move a persons soul
to other bubbles and to keep it there for an unrestricted period of time. As it
is well known, information is virtual, i.e. it
satisfies another human soul feature a non-material quality.
Mans new bubbles can be both artificial and biological. A soul (a complex of
knowledge and information) can be rewritten into a clone of that same person.
To put it otherwise, a person will live forever biologically as well, moving
from old bubbles to new ones. It would be also possible to move a soul to
artificial bodies, which possess all those qualities that we mentioned above.
Furthermore, information (a soul) could be radiated in the form of
electromagnetic waves. These waves can be spread in the universe at the light
speed. They can travel around the universe for thousands of years, reaching its
most distant parts. People see the star light that was radiated millions of
years ago. This means that our immaterial soul can live in the universe in the
form of electromagnetic radiation and then revive in millions of years.
Some of my readers wrote that an old brain can go corrupt and die, when moving
a human soul from one body to another one. If it does not go corrupt, this
inner self will die anyway, when an old biological bubble is not able to
function normally anymore. Let us try to find out, what that inner self is. The
majority of people identify their inner selves with their own bodies. I believe
that the inner self is the information, which is kept in our mind. It is our
soul. Every day we go to sleep. However, our brain does not stop working at
night. Every time we wake up, we have our inner self changed. We die when we
fall asleep and then resurrect when we wake up. This means that recording the
information from a human brain will mean nothing but moving it to another
bubble.
Heaven on Earth
A reporter from the newspaper Argumenty I Fakty (Arguments and Facts) sent me the following
letter:
Dear Mr. Bolonkin. Needless to mention that it is great to
live forever. However, I have a question, which you can guess from a
well-known Soviet joke. A guy is going to join the communist party. A
committee asks him:
- Will you stop drinking?
- Yes, I will.
- Will you quit smoking?
- Yes I will.
- Will you stop loving other women?
- Yes, I will.
- Will you die for the Communist Party of the
- Yes, I will. To hell with this life.
Here is my answer:
You do not need to worry that living in an electronic form will be dull and
boring. It is vice versa, actually. When the information will be recorded onto
other carriers, all human emotions, feelings and so on will also be carried
over and preserved. In addition to that, the copies of certain emotions,
pleasures, fears and so forth will be possible to record separately. After
that, those separately recorded emotions and feelings can be given or sold to
other people. Other e-men will have an opportunity to enjoy sex with a beauty
queen, to experience the enjoyment of a sports victory, to take pleasure of
power and the like. All modern art is based on artists aspiration to transcend
their emotions, to make other people feel, what characters feel. Those works of
art, which make that happen best, are considered to be
outstanding and great. Electronic people will get those emotions directly. To
crown it all, it will be possible to intensify those emotions, as we intensify
a singers voice now. Electronic people will have a huge world of all kinds of
pleasures; it will be possible to know, what a dictator or an animal feels. I
think that an e-mans pleasure time will be limited legally, for the
civilizations progress will stop otherwise. For the time being, the
authorities prohibit drug addiction in order not to let the society degrade.
A souls living in such a virtual world will have all pleasures imaginable. It
will be like living in paradise, as all religions see it. Computer chips of our
time possess the frequency of more than two billion hertz. However, a human
brain reacts to a change of environment only in one-twentieth of a second. This
means that one year of life on Earth is equal to 100 million years of a souls
living in the virtual world (paradise). Living in the virtual world will not be
distinguishable from the real life. It will have a lot more advantages: you
will have an opportunity to choose a palace to live in,
you will have everything that you might wish for. Yet, living in hell also
becomes real. There is a hope that the ability to keep souls alive will be
achieved by highly-civilized countries first. In this case they will prohibit
torturing sinners, as they prohibit torturing criminals nowadays. Furthermore,
criminal investigations will be simplified a lot, judicial mistakes will be
excluded. It will be possible to access a souls consciousness and see every
little detail of this or that action. Sooner or later religious teachings about
soul, heaven and hell will become real. However, all that will be created by
man.
The so-called end of the world will also have a chance to become real, though.
The religious interpretation of this notion implies the end of existence for
all biological people (moving all souls onto artificial carriers, either to
heaven or to hell). However, in difference to religious predictions, this
process is going to be gradual.
The Supreme Mind and Mankinds Existence
I set forth an idea in my first publications that the goal of the mankinds
existence is to create the Supreme Mind and to keep this Mind forever, no
matter what might happen in the universe. The biological mankind is only a
small step on the way to the creation of the Supreme Mind. The nature found a
very good way to create the Supreme Mind: it decided to create a week and
imperfect biological mind at first. It took the nature millions of years to do
that. The twentieth century was a very remarkable period in the history of the
humanity. There has been incredible progress achieved, like never before. The
scientific and the technological level of the humanity became sufficient for
the creation of the artificial intelligence. This will be the first level of
the Supreme Mind, when the human mind will make a step towards immortality. At
present moment we stand on the edge of this process. It is obvious that
biological people will not be able to compete with e-men by the end of this
period. Common people will not be able to learn the knowledge that electronic
people will get. The new cyberworld will be the only
way for a human mind to survive. Feeble and unstable biological elements in a
mind carrier or in its bubble will reduce its abilities and capacities a lot.
If a common person will be willing to become a cyberman,
then this cyberman will be more willing to get rid of
all biological elements in his system and become like everyone. For example,
there are no people in our present society, who would agree to become a monkey
again.
The Supreme Mind will eventually reach immense power. It will be able to move
all over the universe, to control and use its laws. It will become God, if the
notion of God implies something that knows and does everything. In other words,
Man will become God. Yet, it does not mean that this will be the time, when the
Supreme Mind will start dealing with human problems. For instance, ants and
people have a common ancestor. A human being is God against ants. A man can destroy
a huge city of ants (an anthill, in which hundreds of thousands of ants live)
just with one kick. Ants will perceive this as an immense natural disaster,
since they can see at the distance of only one centimeter. I do not know
anyone, who would deal with charitable activities for ants. Everything that a
man can do is to bring ants to a deserted island and give them an opportunity
to reproduce themselves.
A lot of people will say that it is just a fantasy. This is a very convenient
way to cast all that aside, until it starts happening. This is exactly what
happened before the invention of a plane or a computer. It took 50 years to
increase computers memory 100 million times. It would be possible to start
working on the creation of the Supreme Mind, if there were a computer that
would be capable of running a thousand billion of operations during only one
second. In 1994 I said that such a super computer will be invented in the year
2000. I was wrong, for it appeared at the end of 1998. There is also a need of
a self-developing program that would be capable of adjusting itself to
constantly-changing circumstances. A human child does not develop and grow at
once. A child has to study for about 20 years, to learn from his parents and
friends, to have relations with nature and other people in order to gain more
and more experience, to come to realization of his or her inner self.
Unfortunately, the science of the artificial intelligence has chosen a wrong
way of its development from the very start. Scientists tried to develop
programs, which would react to certain external signals. In other words, people
started working on robots that would cope with certain problems. A lot of
efforts have been spent to discover the peculiarities of human speech, for
instance. Some of those scientific works are absolutely no use for the
electronic mind. It is easier for e-men to communicate with the help of their
own electronic language, to recognize objects not by their images, but by way
of measuring their speed, weight, composition and so on. All of that can be
done at a distance. Biologists and physicists have spent decades for those
useless works. They believe that one should study brain activities, find out
the way it works and thinks. Then it would be time for modeling it with the
help of a computer.
This is a wrong way to go as well. A human
brain is very complicated, it is very hard to study
its activities. More importantly, even if we learn how it works, it would not
mean that the method would be good for a computer. Here are some examples to
prove it. Hundreds of years ago people were longing to learn how to fly. They
saw that bird waved its wings for flying, so they tried to model such wings, to
wave them, and to take off. However, people could fly up into the sky only when
they developed still wings and propellers. A waving wing was absolutely not
good for technology, the same way as a propeller is not good for the wild
nature. In addition to that, planes with still wings fly a lot faster than
birds. Another example: ancient people always wanted to run as fast as
four-legged animals. Now everyone knows that no one uses machines that would
move with the help of legs. Legs were changed with wheels something that has
never been used by the natural world.
In 1998 I suggested people should lay new principles as the foundation of
artificial intelligence program. Those principles would be: to realize the goal
of existence, to study the environment (everything that goes separately from
the inner self), to model environment, to predict actions results, to
counteract with the environment in order to achieve temporal and global goals,
to correct modeled environment, actions and their results according to the
results of such counteraction. Unfortunately, I had to deal with the fact that
everyone refused to realize and understand those principles. First of all,
everyone believed that since the virtual ego does not have a human body, it
would never have any rights. They said that it would be possible to control
such an e-man completely and then to kill him (erase his soul from the computer
memory). I wonder, what they would do, if they were offered to kill their
relatives souls that way? People link their body and
soul together, and there is no way around that. They
are ready to struggle for the rights of every living being, but they never want
to accept the rights of a program or of a computer memory. Second of all,
people want an artificial intelligence to give smart answers to their questions
that can be rather stupid at times. They do not need smart answers from babies.
They are always ready to stand all stupid things that children do for years.
Instead, they try to teach them everything. Yet, they want a new artificial
mind to give bright answers without any education. To crown it all, people want
a computer to speak their human language, which is absolutely alien for a
machine. Can you imagine that a person will have to answer the questions of an
alien in Mayas language? Lets assume that a representative of an electronic
civilization came to planet Earth in order to find out, if there are reasonable
creatures living on it. This e-man suggested a common biological man to
multiply 53758210967 by 146, then divide it by 50, deduct 968321 from it and
calculate the hyperbolic sine. A computer would give the correct result of this
sum in less than a second. A man would spend really a long time on that, making
numerous mistakes. However, it would not be correct to say that a computer is
smart and a man isnt.
Religious figures show a strong resistance to these ideas. It stands the reason
that they all think that the creation of the Supreme Mind, immortality ideas
are blasphemous. Unfortunately, the church has already blocked such decisions
as human cloning, increasing the productivity of plants by means of changing
their genes. It should be mentioned here that human cloning does not solve the
questions of immortality. A clone is a copy of its biological bubble. A clone inherits
the biological advantages of a bubble, for example, a singers fine voice, an
athletes strength and the like. A clone will never inherit its copys soul.
Therefore, human cloning is only an illusion of immortality. It can be a
wonderful way to improve the biological bubble of a human being. Moving a human
soul onto other carriers is a very complicated issue. People learned to see,
which brain areas get activated, when a person remembers something, or tries to
solve this or that question. We also learned to penetrate into certain neurons
and record their impulses. To my mind, physiologists chose a wrong way here as
well, when they tried to model brain activities. A human brain is an analogue
of a huge state with a ten billion strong population. There is no use to ask
each citizen of that country, what he or she is doing at the moment. One has to
copy the database of this state, in order to copy its work. The easiest way to
do so is to penetrate into informational channels of its supreme body (the government),
on the inquiry of which the brain presents any information and allows to record
its data on a disk, for instance. It is possible to do that, for the supreme
brain area constantly extracts the necessary knowledge and programs according
to our activities. So, we would need to send intelligent officers to the
brain so that they could get a copy of this state or get connected to its major
information channels.
Another way to do that is to record all incoming and
outgoing information, which comes to/from a person, to record his or her
emotions and reactions. An English-speaking reader, who reviewed one of my
English articles once, told me: Your English is not perfect. You should find
an English-speaking co-author. It is better to have a half of a pie than
nothing at all.
Hope
I do not doubt that the electronic civilization era, the era of the Supreme
Mind and immortality will be achieved sooner or later. Those people, who have
little in common with science, are drawn to believe that everything depends on
scientists. They think that scientists can solve any problem, if they deal with
it profoundly. As a matter of fact, everything depends on state and military
officials. Sometimes, they know nothing of scientific perspectives and
innovations. Scientists are like qualified workers. They need to get paid, they need to work with fine equipment. They will work
only if they are get paid for it. Even if a scientist
will have a wish to do something perspective during his free time, he will have
no necessary equipment for that. Even such powerful companies as IBM, Boeing,
Ford and others are interested only in the applied research, which does not
require large investments. The major goal of such research is to give a maximum
profit to this or that company. A fundamental research, the discoveries that
are important for the whole humanity, not just for a company, might be of
interest to a bright government. It goes without saying that a bright
government is so hard to find. Every government is interested in the military
power of its country. It is ready to fund defense technology works and military
innovations. Von Braun convinced Hitler of real perspectives for missiles, WWII was followed with an arm race. This
eventually led to space achievements and other kinds of technical progress of
the humanity. The
A certain hope has appeared recently. As experience shows, unmanned planes are
a lot cheaper than piloted warplanes. More importantly, unmanned plane crashes
do not cause harsh public reactions in civilized countries as pilots or
soldiers deaths. The Americans design such planes successfully, but the planes
are controlled by an operator within the
I suggested the hierarchical structure of an artificial intelligence, on the
ground of which the real brain probably works. Let us imagine a state with a
dictator at the head. A dictator would never be able to find efficient
solutions for external and internal state problems. A dictator has ministries,
which are then divided into divisions and departments. This forms a pyramid, in
which all departments have their own databases, as well as the access to the
common base. All divisions are busy with their particular problems, in
accordance with the dictators ideology. A dictator only sets problems up,
while adequate divisions suggest solutions. For example, a man decides to cross
a road with a heavy traffic. He looks at the road, while adequate parts of his
brain automatically receive the information about the width of the road, the
distance to nearest cars, their speed, and so on. The brain automatically makes
adequate calculations, which eventually lead to the final decision: when it is
safe to cross the road. All kinds of enlightenment in the solution of a problem
are simply considered to be the help from above. However, this is nothing,
but the joint work of that pyramid. Human beings do not even know that such a
pyramid exists. Pyramids decisions are based on the knowledge of a certain
individual. If an individual knows absolutely nothing about the quantum theory,
he will never solve any of its problems. Therefore, an artificial intelligence
of a high level cannot be realized with a personal computer that has only one
chip and a successive work order.
My scheme stipulates the distribution of functions between parallel chips. The
top one of them is offered to deal only with solution variants, their
estimation and choice.
Every human being wants to extend his or her life. This can be seen from
everyones wish to have children, or to do something outstanding. It is simply
enough to avoid danger sometimes. Even suicidal terrorists believe that they
will go to heaven, when they kill themselves. The most important problem that
the humanity has is the problem of immortality. Let us hope that it will be
solved in the future.
Alexander Bolonkin
Doctor of Technical Science,
(2000)
Alexander Bolonkin worked at aircraft
construction companies in
In the United states Alexander Bolonkin worked as a professor in several
American universities, he worked at US Air Force research centers, at NASA. At
present moment he works on the development of smart unmanned aircraft, with
non-rocketed space launches and flights. Nine of his reports had been accepted
by the World Space Congress of 2002.
References:
The
twenty-first century: the advent of the non-biological civilization and the
future of the human race. Journal Kybernetecs, Vol.28, No.3, 1999.
See other author English articles about this topic in main page of this
WEB:
And a very lot of publications in Russian.
Translated by Dmitry Sudakov