This is the second in a series of posts meant to record and disseminate the author’s thoughts on how a human personality may be kept alive after death through artificial intelligence.
Overview of the project
A human’s personality may endure after their death. Artificial intelligence makes such preservation possible. This personality may then be accessed by others who desire advice from the deceased. This allows mankind to preserve its greatest minds over the course of centuries, and it maintains familial connections across generations.
Foundations #1
A human brain possesses knowledge, sends and receives signals throughout the body, and exhibits a certain psychology.
An AI may be given information, and it can be equipped with tools for receiving inputs and delivering outputs. The necessary technology already exists.
Artificial psychology either does not exist, or, if it does, then it exists in a primitive state.
Psychology produced from natural selection
Psychology is the product of natural selection. Life has existed for hundreds of millions of years, all biological processes have come into existence during this period, most of these innovations have been produced randomly, and species endure because their innovations are conducive to the transmittal of their genetic information to another generation.
Now, psychology is a feature of a brain that prescribes its preferred behaviors. A brain is the nexus of a central nervous system, and a central nervous system arises when the neurons in a diffuse system begin to coalesce.
Psychology arose because certain behaviors are conducive to reproduction, and others are not. Natural selection produced psychology, but nature is not a being, so it could not choose to do so.
So psychology was randomly produced by natural selection, which cannot prefer things, and it now predisposes living creatures to certain behaviors.
A force incapable of valuation acted randomly and produced something which could.
Nature’s indifference accidentally created values.
Computers and valuation
Computers are not the product of their own natural selection, so values will not spontaneously arise within them. Instead, values must be assigned.
Humans may assign these values. Moreover, the possession of a value often dictates how one should behave; this is because specific types of conduct are conducive to certain values, while others are destructive to those same values.
Some behaviors are optimal for realizing certain values. Computers are already able to determine optimal solutions to problems, and they have some ability to act when they understand the optimal solution.
Therefore, if a computer is told what it ought to value, what it ought not value, and how its various values should be ranked against one another, then it should be able to determine optimal methods of meeting its values and act accordingly.
If such a computer is taught to value as a person does, and if the teaching is perfect, then its behaviors would be identical to those of the person in question.
This same computer can then be given a mouth of some sort so that it could express itself in the way that the human would.
This computer, valuing and speaking as a human, would say the same things that a human would say if the computer and human were equivalent in both knowledge and processing power.
Review
I have presented my preliminary understanding of human psyche and its convertibility into an artificial intelligence. The greatest difficulty in doing so resides in teaching the machine proper valuations. A human AI will value as a human does, and this requires an architecture of human values to be created and then converted into code.
A system which accurately reflects the human psyche will need to be designed.
