Physics without the Soul

By Athos,

“Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combination's of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.”

In these words the great Albert Einstein dismissed the existence of soul without the physics. If we take out all the matter of our body then whatever is left can be correctly called ‘empty’, ‘devoid of meaning’ and utterly unimaginable in any real sense….

Great men always draw the line that is followed by faithful followers and Einstein had many. With a stubborn assumption that in this world only the physical matter, is the ‘real’ and ‘measurable’ while the soul and self are mere abstractions above it, Physics like all the other sciences has never dared to cross this line.

However like every theory and equation in mathematics and logic, this prodigious theory also has a possible corollary.

If the soul without body is empty and devoid of meaning then the body without soul is equally empty and devoid of meaning.

Many scientists will strongly disagree with the idea but the bottom line is they cannot entirely disapprove it. If the universe, the big bang, the galaxies and solar system is a wonder, then “I am here to witness this universe” is perhaps the wonder of wonders.

Ironically, the great Einstein himself ignored his own theories when downgrading the soul. Was it not Einstein who first advocated the importance of the witness to an event? The legendary theory of relativity centers on the witness and his ‘frame of reference’. Although Einstein propounded the ‘time-space’ he was forever assuming that there is a witness or selfish entity or soul who is witnessing and sensing that time and space.

However the extremist thinkers are not only to be found at the one end of the argument, there is another thought process, popular among many religious thinkers and spiritual intellectuals. This says that in this world, the soul is the only real thing while everything else is a worthless abstraction, a Maya.

This school of thought also like its scientific counterpart can never fully refuse the validity of their opponent’s viewpoint. The metaphysics first struggles to define the soul itself. The best effort they can put in this front is something like “Whatever that is not this….and not this….and not even this… is the soul” basically it means that soul is not like anything we know in this world. So they assume that there is world in first place and it is not as meaningless as they say about it often.
Although we are not interested in debating which argument stands in the end (as we know many budding scientists and spiritual gurus are making a career out of it and we don’t want to throw them out of the business), we were forced to take decision on this boiling issue when we started designing the ‘breathing’ machine.

The robotic engineers wouldn’t give a damn about these theories when asked to design an Artificial Life. Why we should ever care about it they will say, is it not straightforward that we should build an autonomous robot that behaves perfectly like any living creature or organism? A terminator or something of that sort.

The only problem with this idea is that it is not as straightforward as it seems. There is no perfect boundary line drawn which separates a mechanical doll imitating human or some other animal from actual living body. The line is not drawn yet because there is no universal agreement on what living body actually means in the first place. While the followers of Einstein hold on to the argument that living body is nothing but combination of sensors, processors and devices and combining these things together will produce body, on the other hand the followers of Gautam Buddha will hold that even a rock has soul and emotions hence it is a living body already and no need to create any.

Here we stumbled on a kind of logical junction in our project of building a living machine. Either we have to believe that Physics exists without the soul and start building a humanoid robot OR we assume that soul exists without the physics which means ‘everything’ is living in the first place, and focus on ways of understanding the emotions of the machine. So either take admission in MIT or join a yoga class there is no other way.

Both these seemingly logical approaches stealthily hide their far fetched assumptions and hopes. When MIT engineer builds humanoid robots he actually hopes by some miracle this robot will get self conscious and gradually evolve to become a real living body. The yoga scholar trying to communicate with the machine (or any object for that matter) hopes that some day he will actually bind (yoga) with that object and may communicate with it as if it were living or may experience life from within the object.

If the research’s success is based on an event which is totally out of your control like machine achieving self consciousness on its own, or machine responding to your communication then we cannot term it as a perfectly logical enterprise.

Rather than endlessly debating whether chicken came first or the egg came first, we should understand that in this world, egg and the chicken came out of each other. The physics and all the sciences which study the physical matter are witnessed from the soul, while soul is witnessed from the physical world. We cannot imagine one without the other.

Any attempt to create a life ignoring this simple fact will not be complete. An attempt focusing only on physical matter will end up creating a terminator robot, and we will never be sure of whether there is anyone ‘inside’ it or it is just a maze of interconnected devices. On the same lines, an attempt to create life believing world is just a maya will end up creating a Matrix, and it will never be ‘real’ world but delirious dream cooked up by mind.

The deal is simple, either you create a false world and a real self (matrix), or you create a real world with false self (robot).

Rather than being a fanatic and following either of the two approaches is it not possible to combine these extreme viewpoints of life into one?

Rather than creating only exterior (body) or only interior (mind) and faking out the remaining part, which is a popular approach of the present, we should actually build both the exterior and the interior and connect them both. By this way we will not fake up any of the ends and world would be complete from inside to outside.

Let me put this argument in one simple example.

Suppose we are designing robot which can actually speak with us and suppose we are following the ‘exterior’ strategy i.e. the robot should externally look and feel like a speaking body. Typically we will first create plastic mould which would look exactly like a human face. Then we would fit a speaker under his lips, so anything coming out of the speaker will actually feel like coming out of the mouth. Then at the place of ears we would fit our sound recorders and we will record every sound coming to it in nice little hard drive hidden beneath what it appears as its skull. Then we will fit a processor chip besides the hard drive and store a program on it written by some geek computer scientist, which will for every recorded sound, jumble the quadratic equations and swift through data structures and query giga byte databases to finally flush out the response ‘sound’ out of the speaker. Thus a processor with hard drive and a set of recorder and speaker using a good makeup will fake out as ‘speaking body’. Can we hope to build a real speaking machine using this paradigm?

The other strategy which we call ‘interior’ strategy is not also behind in act of faking.

Consider your favorite I-Phone application or word processors or your favorite Counter Strike Game. They are all created to fake exterior virtual world in front of your real interior senses. To create a 3d game , it is not required to create a real 3d world but a 2d picture which will fake your eye into believing that it is a 3d world. Rather than creating a real object which can be touched, creating a touch screen ‘interface’ can do a similar trick. Why to create a real paper, when you can fake the eye by drawing a white sheet on the digital screen…

The problem in both of these theories is that they are totally fake at the one of the ends. So the entities created using these ideas are always ‘half’ complete in terms of real living entities. Thus, in the most layman-like idea we are proposing to join these two complimenting halves.

In one approach we can create a world in front of the real eyes. While in other we can create eyes in front of the real world. What if we place these ‘created’ eyes in front of the ‘created’ world. Since both of these are equally fake or equally real, together can they create a fully functioning living world?

The idea is rather than forcing robot to look like human or animal in our world or modeling virtual world relative only to human senses, we will build new body for sensing new worlds and imagine the sensor(soul) to be ‘inside’ of this body rather than outside.

In reality also, the human witness of living world is optional. Can u see bacteria’s world externally or internally? Can u see bacteria’s body by your raw senses? Or Can you feel what bacteria senses from inside his body? No. Yet when designing an Artificial life we place a stubborn condition that we (humans) should witness this world either externally (robot approach) or internally (FPS game approach),

The trick is that the Artificially living entity should live in the world which is in accordance with its senses and whatever actions it does in that world (expression) should make sense only in that world and not the human world. His internal world (cognitive world) should correspond to his external world (physical world).

Take example of a snake. A snake sees the world in a different way than we humans do. We can only imagine what scene of this world unfolds in front his eyes. Whatever actions he takes are logical in the world he senses and not the world we sense. The intelligence of snake is founded on the world he experiences thus any science he will develop will be much different than us but most definitely it will be fully accurate in his world.

To model this world we need to combine the concepts of science with the concepts of soul i.e. we should not only concentrate on building an artificial snake but we should also model an artificial world in front of his eyes. Our experience in building robots can be handy in creating artificial snake body, while our experience in programming counter strike and FPS game can made useful in modeling snake’s world in front of his eyes.

The combination of physics and metaphysics can completely define the living world. Rather than studying these concepts in isolation often at the cost of degrading one, there should be an effort to find the correlation between them. As they both are mere viewpoints of the one living world.

The bottom line is, that Physics without soul and vice versa is an incomplete strategy of building Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence.