Philosophical Musing

I've always been an idealistic person, always intrigued by things, feelings, and situations that are sensational, captivating. I like reading books with an exemplary hero, an element of magic, adventure, or flights of fantasy. I like associating love with those rare magnetic moments that envelope your entire being. More wildly, I like imagining the fate of the universe and mankind resting on our own creation. That is, I’m speaking of sentient machines. Artificial intelligence has always been a fascinating subject to me. Of course we are decades, possibly centuries away from true AI. But, if we are to create sentient beings in the image of our likeness, as it is the only way we know how, we must first reverse engineer the human brain and decipher our own intelligence, which in itself is another phenomenon.

The other day in AI class, my professor brought up something very interesting. He asked us to tell him the phone number of the White House. We immediate acknowledge that we do not know. And that, quite frankly, is the genius of the human brain. We did not have to search our memory bank to come up or not come up with an answer. We instantly know that we do not have that information; whereas, computer systems must have a searching process in their database. If we are able to understand how our human brain can bypass this search method, perhaps we can shift the paradigm of how knowledge can be attained.

RJ and I often discuss about living forever by preserving our brain and reconstructing our memories onto another stronger body/host. He believes that if something has all the same memories as you, then it is essentially you. I, on the other hand, believe that just because a host has all of your memories does not make it you. It’s like cloning a person, you’re missing an important element and that is the human consciousness. If my conscious no longer exists, it is just someone else with my memories. Perhaps if we were born in the next century, we would have the answer to this puzzle. I often question if it is a blessing to be born in my age for the reason that I do not have to witness some sort of Apocalypse that would end my race, or that it is a curse not to be able to witness the ultimate advancement of my species.

Emo Philips: “I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”