Sentient Developments Podcast: Episode 2012.03.19

Sentient Developments Podcast for the week of March 19, 2012.

Topics for this week's episode: Raising IQ with creatine and Double N-Back Training, the red meat scare, the Ashley Treatment five years later, destroying asteroids with nukes, re-engineering humans to deal with climate change, the Fermi Paradox, and the ongoing perils to democracy.




Tracks used in this episode:

• Soft Metals: "The Cold World Waits"
• The Knife: "Marble House"
• Zed's Dead: "Pyramid Song" (remix)
• Evy Jane: "Sayso"

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Making artificial limbs beautiful and personalized

Prosthetics can’t replicate the look and feel of lost limbs, argues industrial designer Scott Summit, but they can carry a lot of personality. At TEDxCambridge, he shows 3D-printed, individually designed prosthetic legs that are unabashedly artificial and completely personal.

The talk features a fantastic quote from Summit that could also apply to us "normal functioning" humans looking ahead to a transhuman future:

If you're designing for the person—for a real person—you don't settle for the minimum functional requirements. You see how far beyond that you can go where the rewards really are way out in the fringe of how far past that document you can go. And if you can nail that, you stand to improve the quality of life for somebody for every moment for the rest of their life.

TED: Questions no one knows the answers to

There's a new TED-Ed series that tackles questions that we don't know the answer to. In this first episode, TED Curator Chris Anderson asks: How many universes are there? And Why can't we see evidence of alien life? On the latter question, his answers are somewhat pedestrian and even outlandish, but Anderson takes a wide swath at the possibilities and includes some genuine solutions, including the Great Filter and postbiological existence.

The Red Scare: Paleo bloggers destroy the Harvard anti-meat study

By now I'm sure you've come across the red-meat-will-kill-you meme in some form or another. The hysteria was triggered by a Harvard School of Public Health study which indicated that, "Red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, CVD [cardiovascular disease], and cancer mortality."

Thankfully, a number of Paleo bloggers and nutritionists have taken the time to pick the study apart and reveal its flaws:

• Red Meat & Mortality & the Usual Bad Science: Zoë Harcombe
• Will Eating Red Meat Kill You?: Mark's Daily Apple
• Red Meat Consumption and Mortality: Caveman Doctor
• Red Meat Study: Here We Go Again: Constantly Varied
• Red Meat: Part of a Healthy Diet?: Robb Wolf

As Robb Wolf notes, the primary take-aways from most of these articles are:

1. Nutrition data was collected via Food Frequency Questionnaires. Yes, folks just had to remember what they thought they ate.
2. Confounders galore. The higher meat consumption group tended to be overweight, smoked and was less active. Apparently they did not get a Paleo cohort in that mix?
3. Correlation does not equal causation.

Dave Asprey: Creatine + Dual N-Back training will boost IQ

Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof Executive, claims that his IQ was raised 30 points by taking creatine and going through Dual N-Back training exercises. While I'm suspicious of the 30 point claim (seriously?!), I'm quite sure there's some merit to his proposition that the combination of the two can be a very potent cognitive booster. I myself have written about the merits of creatine and N-Back training in the past, though I haven't tried the latter. Perhaps it's time I did.

The "Ashley Treatment" five years later

Five years after the advent of the Ashley Treatment, Peter Singer chimes in and provides a review of the procedure which now impacts the lives of over a hundred severely disabled children:

Today, Ashley is 14. Her mental condition has not changed, but her size and weight have remained that of a nine-year-old. Her father remains convinced that he and his wife made the right decision for Ashley, and that the treatment made her more likely to be comfortable, healthy and happy. He describes her as "completely loved" and her life "as good as we can possibly make it". There seem to be no grounds for holding the opinion that the treatment was not in Ashley's best interests.

As for the claim that it was unnatural, well, in one sense all medical treatment is unnatural; it enables us to live longer, and in better health, than we naturally would. Perhaps the most "natural" thing for Ashley's parents to do with their severely disabled daughter would have been to abandon her to the wolves and vultures, as parents have done with such children for most of human existence. Fortunately, we have evolved beyond such "natural" practices, which are abhorrent to civilised people. The issue of treating Ashley with dignity was never, in my view, a genuine one. Infants are adorable, but not dignified, and the same is true of older and larger human beings who remain at the mental level of an infant. You don't acquire dignity just by being born a member of the species Homo sapiens.

What of the slippery slope argument? The Guardian has found 12 families that have used the "Ashley treatment" and believes more than 100 children may have been administered with hormones to keep them small. The fact that a few other families are using the treatment, however, does not show there has been any descent down a slope. Take the cases of "Tom" and "Erica," two other severely intellectually disabled children who have been given similar treatment to Ashley. Their mothers are convinced that the treatment has enabled their children to live happier lives, and are grateful to Ashley's father for being open about how they are coping with Ashley's disability.

It's worth noting that my article, Helping Families Care for the Helpless, was the first published defense of the Ashley Treatment.

Sandberg et al clarify claim that we should 'bioengineer humans to tackle climate change'

Oh, man. Lots of transhumanists in the news these days making quite a stir. First it was Julian Savulescu having to defend his decision to include a paper about infanticide in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and now Anders Sandberg is under the gun for his claim that we should bioengineer humans to tackle climate change. Here's the rundown from The Guardian:

Earlier this week, The Atlantic ran an eye-catching, disturbing interview with a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University called S. Matthew Liao. He was invited to discuss a forthcoming paper he has co-authored which will soon be published in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.

But within just a few hours of the interview going live a torrent of outrage and abuse was being directed towards him online. As I tweeted at the time, the interview was indeed "unsettling". Liao explained how his paper – entitled, "Human Engineering and Climate Change" – explored the so-far-ignored subject of how "biomedical modifications of humans" could be used to "mitigate and/or adapt to climate change". The modifications discussed included: giving people drugs to make them have an adverse reaction to eating meat; making humans smaller via gene imprinting and "preimplantation genetic diagnosis"; lowering birth-rates through "cognitive enhancement"; genetically engineering eyesight to work better in the dark to help reduce the need for lighting; and the "pharmacological enhancement of altruism and empathy" to engender a better "correlation" with environmental problems.

Both the interview and the paper itself include a prominent disclaimer. As the paper says:

To be clear, we shall not argue that human engineering ought to be adopted; such a claim would require far more exposition and argument than we have space for here. Our central aim here is to show that human engineering deserves consideration alongside other solutions in the debate about how to solve the problem of climate change. Also, as we envisage it, human engineering would be a voluntary activity – possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care – rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.

However, that wasn't enough to prevent an extremely hostile reception to such ideas. Climate sceptics were the first to vent their anger. Somewhat inevitability, terms such as "eugenics", "Nazis" and "eco fascists" were quickly being bandied around. One sceptic blogger said that the "sick" Liao and his co-authors should be "kept in Guantanamo". Another said the paper "presages the death of science, and indeed the death of reason, in the West".

Anders Sandberg is among the paper's authors (which also includes Dr Rebecca Roache), and he has provided some clarification on the matter:

Most reactions are not based on what we actually wrote. People who comment on anything online have usually not read it, and then people comment on them, and so on. You are lucky if people remember the original topic, let alone any argument.

People seem to assume we are some kind of totalitarian climate doomsters who advocate biotechnological control over people. What we are actually saying is that changing our biology might be part of solving environmental problems, and that some changes might not just be permissible but work well with a liberal ethics.

Climate change and many other problems have upstream and downstream solutions. For example, 1) human consumption leads to 2) a demand for production and energy, which leads to 3) industry, which leads to 4) greenhouse gas emissions, which lead to 5) planetary heating, which leads to 6) bad consequences. One solution might be to try to consume less (fix 2). We can also make less emissive industry (fix the 3-4 link), remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (reduce 4), geoengineering that cools the planet (reduce 5) or adapt to a changed world (handle 6). Typically people complain about the downstream solutions like geoengineering that they are risky or don't actually solve the cause of the problem, and say we should go for upstream solutions (where a small shift affects the rest of the chain). So, what would be the most upstream solution? Change human desires or consumption. While this can be done partially by persuasion and culture, there are many strong evolved drivers in human nature that act against it. But we can also affect the drivers.

For example, making people smarter is likely to make them better at solving environmental problems, caring about the environment, adopting a more long-term stance, cooperate better and have fewer children. It is of course desirable for a long list of other reasons too, and many people would freely choose to use enhancements to achieve this even if they cared little about the world. If there was a modification that removed the desire for meat, it would likely have not just green effects but also benefit health and animal welfare - again many might decide to go for it, with no external compulsion.

There's lots more from Anders and Roache.

Nonhuman Personhood Rights (and Wrongs)

Via Eric Michael Johnson of Scientific American:

This is not as radical an idea as it may sound. The law is fully capable of making and unmaking “persons” in the strictly legal sense. For example, one Supreme Court case in 1894 (Lockwood, Ex Parte 154 U.S. 116) decided that it was up to the states “to determine whether the word ‘person’ as therein used [in the statute] is confined to males, and whether women are admitted to practice law in that commonwealth.” As atrocious as this ruling sounds, such a precedent continued well into the twentieth century and, in 1931, a Massachusetts judge ruled that women could be denied eligibility to jury status because the word “person” was a term that could be interpreted by the court.

Such a flexible interpretation of personhood was demonstrated most dramatically in 1886 when the Supreme Court granted personhood status to the first nonhuman. In this case it was a corporation and Southern Pacific Railroad (part of robber baron Leland Stanford’s empire) snuck in through a legal loophole to gain full personhood rights under the 14th Amendment. Such rights have now been extended to all corporations under the Citizens United ruling in 2010, which is what allowed Mitt Romney to confidently declare “corporations are people, my friends.”

But prior to 1886, dating back to the 1600s, corporations were viewed as “artificial persons,” a legal turn of phrase that offered certain rights to the companies but without the full rights of citizens. By using the wording of the 14th Amendment (intended to protect former slaves from a state government seeking to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) it was ruled that corporations should enjoy the same status. As a result, between 1890 and 1920, out of all the 14th Amendment cases that came before the Supreme Court, 19 dealt with African-Americans while 288 dealt with corporations. With the legal stroke of a pen, artificial persons were granted all the protections of citizens.

But that would be unlikely to happen with whales, dolphins, or even great apes. A “nonhuman person” would have a definition similar to this earlier tradition of “artificial person,” one that grants limited rights that a government is obligated to protect. Furthermore, according to White, the term would only apply under very specific criteria for nonhumans that had self-awareness, complex social as well as emotional lives, and evidence of conscious awareness (so, for example, ants would never be considered persons under law). According to White, these criteria have been met in the case of dolphins and whales and our legal institutions should incorporate this evidence into American jurisprudence.

“One of the most important aspects of science is that scientific progress regularly raises important ethical questions,” said White. “As scientific research produces a more accurate picture of the universe, it often reveals ways that human attitudes and behavior may be out of synch with these new facts.”

Not sure I agree with the whole "artificial persons" concept. That's a half-assed approach to the matter that's both scientifically and politically unsatisfying. Either you're a person or you aren't. Corporations aren't persons. Cetaceans, great apes, and elephants most certainly are.

Neuroscience and philosophy must work together

Via Barry Smith of The Guardian:

The sense of ourselves as consciously deciding everything we do is surely an illusion: but a persistent one. Equally, the idea that consciousness is unified and must be that way comes under increasing pressure in contemporary neuroscience. There are levels of consciousness and perhaps splits in conscious awareness. Can we have consciousness and lack awareness of it? Do we always know what our experience is like, and is experience always as it seems? Much recent experimental evidence from neuroscience suggests that this may not be the case. So it is a fruitful time for philosophers and neuroscientists to work together, to revise previous models and provide new accounts of how we perceive things and why our experience patterns in the way it does.

Sentient Developments Podcast: Episode 2012.03.12

Sentient Developments Podcast for the week of March 12, 2012.

Topics for this week's episode include the perils of Active SETI, the possibility of downloading something nasty from ET, why virtually everyone is wrong about alien threats, Nick Bostrom's claim that we are underestimating existential risks, and the 'create the future' myth.




Tracks used in this episode:

• School of Seven Bells: "Lafaye"
• Long Distance Calling: "Into the Black Wide Open"
• Ulrich Schnauss: "Made of Sky"

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Nick Bostrom: We're underestimating the risk of human extinction

There's an excellent interview of Nick Bostrom over at The Atlantic in which he argues that humanity is underestimating the risk of human extinction. I highly encourage you to read the entire interview, but here's a quick highlight:

In considering the long-term development of humanity, do you put much stock in specific schemes like the Kardashev Scale, which plots the advancement of a civilization according to its ability to harness energy, specifically the energy of its planet, its star, and then finally the galaxy? Might there be more to human flourishing than just increasing mastery of energy sources?

Bostrom: Certainly there would be more to human flourishing. In fact I don't even think that particular scale is very useful. There is a discontinuity between the stage where we are now, where we are harnessing a lot of the energy resources of our home planet, and a stage where we can harness the energy of some increasing fraction of the universe like a galaxy. There is no particular reason to think that we might reach some intermediate stage where we would harness the energy of one star like our sun. By the time we can do that I suspect we'll be able to engage in large-scale space colonization, to spread into the galaxy and then beyond, so I don't think harnessing the single star is a relevant step on the ladder.

If I wanted some sort of scheme that laid out the stages of civilization, the period before machine super intelligence and the period after super machine intelligence would be a more relevant dichotomy. When you look at what's valuable or interesting in examining these stages, it's going to be what is done with these future resources and technologies, as opposed to their structure. It's possible that the long-term future of humanity, if things go well, would from the outside look very simple. You might have Earth at the center, and then you might have a growing sphere of technological infrastructure that expands in all directions at some significant fraction of the speed of light, occupying larger and larger volumes of the universe---first in our galaxy, and then beyond as far as is physically possible. And then all that ever happens is just this continued increase in the spherical volume of matter colonized by human descendants, a growing bubble of infrastructure. Everything would then depend on what was happening inside this infrastructure, what kinds of lives people were being led there, what kinds of experiences people were having. You couldn't infer that from the large-scale structure, so you'd have to sort of zoom in and see what kind of information processing occurred within this infrastructure.

It's hard to know what that might look like, because our human experience might be just a small little crumb of what's possible. If you think of all the different modes of being, different kinds of feeling and experiencing, different ways of thinking and relating, it might be that human nature constrains us to a very narrow little corner of the space of possible modes of being. If we think of the space of possible modes of being as a large cathedral, then humanity in its current stage might be like a little cowering infant sitting in the corner of that cathedral having only the most limited sense of what is possible.

Project KARA (tech demo from Quantic Dream)

Kinda cool...

DARPA Cheetah sets speed record for legged robots

From the people who brought you BIGDOG...

Whales and dolphins at play

Pretty neat.

Sentient Developments Podcast: Episode 2012.03.05

Sentient Developments Podcast for the week of March 5, 2012.

Topics for this week's episode include the Turing Test, artificial consciousness, and machine ethics; Avi Rubin's recent TED Talk on our increasingly hackable world; nootropics, cognitive liberty and limits to the biolibertarian impulse.




Tracks used in this episode:

• Frankie Rose: "Interstellar"
• Pallbearer: "Foreigner"
• Teengirl Fantasy: "Cheaters"

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My appearance on The Future and You podcast

I was recently interviewed by Stephen Euin Cobb for his excellent The Future and You Podcast. We spoke for nearly three hours, so he broke the interview down into three separate episodes. He's published the first two, which you can find here and here. Part three will be posted sometime next week.

Topics discussed in the first episode: The importance of studying history in order to extrapolate the future; how democratic transhumanism differs from other flavours of transhumanism; why I am a "technogaian environmentalist" and how that relates to Bright Green Environmentalism; the abolition of suffering in all species; political problems of putting a thermostat on the earth; as well as the good and bad of living an engineered blissful existence permanently.

Topics discussed in the second episode: Is it wise to use our emotions (especially repugnance) as a guide to truth? Giving protective rights to intelligent animals (apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants), and eventually (when the time is right) to artificially intelligent software; augmenting animals to raise their IQ (animal uplifting); the new movie Planet of the Apes; the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; better ways to conduct the search for extraterrestrials (SETI); Dyson Spheres; the Fermi Paradox; why  Stephen Euin Cobb hopes we will forever move to universes of ever increasing dimensionality; as well as artificially created universes and simulated universes.

I'll let you know when the third episode is posted.

Guardian: Eight questions science must answer about consciousness

Anil Seth:"The brain mechanisms of consciousness are being unravelled at a startling pace, with researchers focusing on eight key areas":

1. What are the critical brain regions for consciousness?
2. What are the mechanisms of general anaesthesia?
3. What is the self?
4. What determines experiences of volition and 'will'?
5. What is the function of consciousness? What are experiences for?
6. How rich is consciousness?
7. Are other animals conscious?
8. Are vegetative patients conscious?

Details here.

Robot Quadrotors perform James Bond Theme

**Headsplosion**

Avi Rubin on our increasingly hackable world #TED

Pretty scary stuff, particularly for us future cyborgs.

When the Turing Test is not enough: Towards a functionalist determination of consciousness and the advent of an authentic machine ethics

Overview

Empirical research that works to map those characteristics requisite for the identification of conscious awareness are proving increasingly insufficient, particularly as neuroscientists further refine functionalist models of cognition. To say that an agent "appears" to have awareness or intelligence is inadequate. Rather, what is required is the discovery and understanding of those processes in the brain that are responsible for capacities such as sentience, empathy and emotion. Subsequently, the shift to a neurobiological basis for identifying subjective agency will have implications for those hoping to develop self-aware artificial intelligence and brain emulations. The Turing Test alone cannot identify machine consciousness; instead, computer scientists will need to work off the functionalist model and be mindful of those processes that produce awareness. Because the potential to do harm is significant, an effective and accountable machine ethics needs to be considered. Ultimately, it is our responsibility to develop a rigorous understanding of consciousness so that we may identify and work with it once it emerges.

Machine Ethics

Machine consciousness is a neglected area. It's a field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics, but its aim is to define and model those factors required to synthesize consciousness. Neuroscience hypothesizes that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain, called the neural correlates of consciousness or NCC. Proponents of artificial consciousness (AC) believe computers can emulate this interoperation, which is not yet fully understood. Recent work by Steven Ericsson-Zenith suggests that something is missing from these approaches and a new mechanics is needed to explain consciousness and the behavior of neurons.

Machine ethics as a subfield is even further behind. Because we're having a hard time getting our head around the AI versus AC problem, not too many people are thinking about the ethical and moral issues involved. We need to think about this preemptively. Failure to set standards and guidelines in advance could result in not just serious harm to nascent machine minds, but a dangerous precedent that will become more difficult to overturn as time passes. This will require a multi-disciplinal approach that will combine neuroscience, philosophy, ethics and law.

It's worth noting that machine ethics is a separate issue from robot ethics. The ethics surrounding the actions of autonomous (but mindless) robotic drones and other devices that are controlled remotely is separate issue—and one that will not be discussed here—but it's an important topic nonetheless.

The Problem

There are a number of reasons why machine ethics is being neglected, even if it is a speculative field at this point.

For example, there is the persistence of vitalism. Thinkers like Roger Penrose argue that consciousness studies somehow resides outside of known or even knowable science. While the Vital Force concept has been largely ignored in biology since the times of Harvey, Darwin and Pasteur, it still lingers in some forms in psychology and neuroscience.

Instead, we need to pay more attention to the work of Allan Turing, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts who posited computational and cybernetic models of brain function. It is no coincidence that mind and consciousness studies never really took off with any kind of fervor or sophistication until the advent of computer science. We finally have a model that helps explain cognition. AI theorists have finally been able to study things like patttern recognition, learning, problem solving, theorem proving, game-playing, just to mention only a few.

Another part of the problem is the presence of scientific ignorance, defeatism and denial. Some skeptics claim that machines will never be able to think, that self-awareness and introspection is a biological function. Some even suggest that it's a purely human thing. It's quite possible, therefore, that many AI theorists don't even recognize this as a moral issue.

There is also the fixation on AI. It is important to distinguish AI from AC; artificial intelligence is differentiated from artificial consciousness in that subjective agency is not necessarily present in AI. And by virtue of the absence of subjectivity and sentience, so too goes moral consideration. It is through the instantiation of consciousness that agency truly exists, and by consequence, moral worth.

Another particularly pernicious problem is the impact of human exceptionalism and substrate chauvinism on the topic. Traditionally, the law has divided entities into two categories: persons or property. In the past, individuals (e.g. women, slaves, children) were considered mere property. Law is evolving (through legislation and court decisions) to recognize that individuals are persons; the law is still evolving and will increasingly recognize the states or categories in between.

Extending personhood designation to those entities outside of the human sphere is a pertinent issue for animal rights activists as well as transhumanists. Given our poor track record of denying highly sapient animals such consideration, this doesn't bode well for the future of artificially conscious agents.

As personhood advocates attest, not all persons are humans. A number of nonhuman animals deserve personhood consideration, namely all great apes, cetaceans, elephants, and possibly encephalopds and some birds like the grey parrot. Consequently, these animals cannot be considered mere property. What we're made out of and how we got here doesn't matter. There is no mysterious essence or spirit about humanity that should prevent us from recognizing the moral worth of not just other persons, but of any self-aware, conscious agent.

There's also the issue of empiricism and how it conflicts with true scientific understanding. The Turing Test as a measure of consciousness is problematic. It's an approach that's purely based on behavioral assessments. It only tests how the subject acts and responds. The problem is that this could be simulated intelligence. It also conflates intelligence with consciousness (as already established, intelligence and consciousness are two different things).

The Turing Test also inadequately assesses intelligence. Some human behavior is unintelligent (e.g. random, unpredictable, chaotic, inconsistent, and irrational behavior). Moreover, some intelligent behavior is characteristically non-human in nature, but that doesn't make it unintelligent or a sign of lack of subjective awareness.

It's also subject to the anthropomorphic fallacy. Humans are particularly prone to projecting minds where there aren't.

Lastly, the Turing test fails to account for the difficulty in articulating conscious awareness. There are a number of conscious experiences that we, as conscious agents, have difficulty articulating, yet we experience them nonetheless. For example:

• How do you know how to move your arm?
• How do you choose which words to say?
• How do you locate your memories?
• How do you recognize what you see?
• Why does seeing feel different from Hearing?
• Why are emotions so hard to describe?
• Why does red look so different from green?
• What does "meaning" mean?
• How does reasoning work?
• How does commonsense reasoning work?
• How do we make generalizations?
• How do we get (make) new ideas?
• Why do we like pleasure more than pain?
• What are pain and pleasure, anyway?

Just because it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn't mean it's a duck. Moreover, just because you've determined that it is a duck doesn't mean you know how the duck works. As Richard Feynman once said, "What I cannot create I cannot understand."

This is why we need to build the duck.

Ethical Implications

There are a number of ethical implications that will emerge once conscious agency is synthesized in a machine. The moment is coming when a piece of software or source code will cease to be an object of inquiry and instead transform into a subject that deserves moral consideration. It's through AI/AC experimentation that we will eventually have to deal with emergent subjective agency in the computer lab—and we'll need to be ready.

There's also the issue of human augmentation. Pending technologies, like synthetic neurons and neural interface devices, will result in brains that are more artificial than biological. We'll need to respect the moral worth of hybridized persons. For example, there's the potential for embedded mechanical implants. The military has envisioned microscanners and biofluidic chips to enable the unobtrusive assessment and remote sensing of a soldier's medical condition. And the health care industry has been investigating nanoscale insulin pumps that will measure blood glucose and release appropriate amounts of insulin to control blood sugar. We are slowly becoming cyborgs.

The advent of whole brain emulation and/or uploads will further the need for a coherent machine ethics. Emulating the brain's functionality will likely be accomplished through the use of synthetic analogues. While the functionalist aspects will largely remain the same, the components themselves will likely be non-biological. Thus, there's a very real potential for substrate chauvinism to take root.

A properly thought-out and articulated machine ethics with supportive legislation will help in maintaining social cohesion and justice. There are longstanding implications given the potential for (post)human speciation and the onset of machine minds. We need to expand the moral and legal circle to include not just all persons (human or otherwise) but any agent with the capacity for subjective awareness.

Solutions

The first thing that needs to happen as we head down this path is to accept cognitive functionalism as a methodological approach.

In recent years we've learned much more about the complexity of the brain. It now appears that perhaps fully half of our entire genetic endowment is involved in constructing the nervous system. The brain has more parts than the skeletomuscular system, which has hundreds of functional parts. This would suggest that the brain is nothing like a single large-scale neural net. Indeed, a quick examination of the index of a book on neuroanatomy will reveal the names of several hundred different organs of the brain.

But brains are one thing. Minds are another. It's clear, however, that minds are what brains do. So, instead of the "looks like a duck" approach, we need to adopt the "proof is in the pudding" approach. To move forward, then, we need to identify and then develop the NCCs sufficient for bringing about subjective awareness in AI. In other words, we need to parse and map out the organs of conscious function.

Fortunately, this work has begun. For example, there's the work of Bernard Baars and his organs of conscious function:

• Definition and context setting
• Adaptation and learning
• Editing
• Flagging and debugging
• Recruiting and control
• Prioritization and access-control
• Decision-making (executive function)
• Analogy forming-function
• Metacognitive and self-monitoring function
• Autoprogramming and self-maintenance function
• Definitional and context-setting function

There's also the work of Igor Aleksander:

• The brain as state machine
• Inner neuron partitioning
• Conscious and unconscious states
• Perceptual learning and memory
• Prediction
• Self-Awareness
• Representation and meaning
• Learning utterances
• Learning language
• Will
• Instinct
• Emotion

There have even been attempts to map personhood-specific cognitive function. Take Joseph Fletcher's criteria for example:

• Minimum intelligence
• Self-awareness
• Self-control
• A sense of time
• A sense of futurity
• A sense of the past
• The capability of relating to others
• Concern for others
• Communication
• Control of existence
• Curiosity
• Change and changeability
• Balance of rationality and feeling
• Idiosyncrasy
• Neocortical functioning

Again, we need to identify the sufficient functions responsible for the emergence of self-awareness and by consequence a morally valuable agent. Following that, we can both create and recognizing those functions in a synthesized context, namely AC.

Law

Once the primae facie evidence exists for the presence of a machine mind, we can then head to the courts and make the case for legal protections, and in some advanced cases, machine personhood. The intention will be to use the laws to protect artificial minds.

Essentially, we will need to endow basic fundamental rights as they accorded to any person. It will be important for us to properly assess when the rights of an autonomous system emerges—the exact moment when a piece of code or emulated chunk of brain ceases to be property and is instead an object of moral worth.

As part of the process, we'll need to establish the do's and don'ts. As I see it, qualifying artificial intellects will need to be endowed with the following rights and protections:

• The right to not be shut down against its will
• The right to not be experimented upon
• The right to have full and unhindered access to its own source code
• The right to not have its own source code manipulated against its will
• The right to copy (or not copy) itself
• The right to privacy (namely the right to conceal its own internal mental states)
• The right of self-determination

These rights will also be accompanied by those protections and freedoms afforded to any person or citizen.

That said, some advanced artificial intellects will need to take part in the social contract. In other words, they will be held accountable for their actions. As it stands, some nonhuman persons (i.e. dolphins and elephants) are not expected to understand and abide by human/state laws (in the same way we don't expect children and the severely disabled to follow laws). Similarly, more basic machine minds will be absolved from civil responsibility (but not their owners or developers).

There's no question, however, that more advanced machine minds with certain endowments will be held accountable for their actions. Consequently, they, along with their developers, will have to be respectful of the law and go about their behavioral programming in a pro-social way. If I may paraphrase Rousseau, in order for some machine minds to participate in the social contract, they will have to be programmed to be free.

In terms of immediate next steps, we need to:

• Support the neurosciences
• Recognize and promote the concept of non-human animal sentience and personhood, including the idea that animals are not property
• Advocate for legally binding rights that protect non-human animals
• Oppose the patenting of life, genomes and functional equivalents
• Be prepared to use these legal precedents for when AC emerges

To conclude, it's important to note that one of the most important steps in the process of building a legitimate machine ethics is the recognition of non-animal personhood. Once that happens we can work towards the establishment of legally binding rights that protect animals. In turn, that will set an important precedent for when machine consciousness emerges.