Teaching the Mind-Body Problem with Ray Kurzweil, AI and the Singularity
So in the ethics class, we watched The Matrix to set up the problem of skepticism. (Side note: I remember teaching my first Philosophy class in fall ’99. As I lectured on Descartes, a bunch of students told me about this new movie that was totally an example of what Descartes was talking about. I scoffed at first, but they were right. Once it was so cutting edge. Now my students laugh at the cell phones and Keanu’s kung fu poses.)
I decided to follow up with this Wired story from a few years ago about Ray Kurzweil’s belief that in the not-too-distant future we’ll be able to back our brains up as computer programs. I’m still trying to help my students work through the article itself, but it does set up an interesting way of looking at the mind-body problem. If you can preserve the “information” parts of who you are, even without the more obvious physical aspects, are you still you? That there are people working on this even today is a nice way to take the philosophical question out of the abstract. Plus I still have somewhat fond memories of doing my undergrad thesis on the philosophy of AI. 🙂
These days, I admit, I fear that even if we could transform ourselves into intelligent programs, we’d just have to spend all of our time updating our drivers. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Apple will come up with iMind.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.