ASM019 Clones, Artificial Intelligence, and the Science of Shame

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clones artificial intelligence and the science of shame all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life and man do we have some great questions this week i also want to let you know that we just released a 20th episode of the liturgies podcast on lgbtq equality and the church lots of people downloaded it it was a wonderful episode highly recommend you check it out but for now let's get it started hi science mike uh this uh i'd like to know uh do clone and artificial intelligence have a soul oh thanks a lot well good news the clones part is easy uh if if people have souls clones have souls pretty simple uh their to our knowledge has never been a human clone however we have a natural equivalent of a human clone which is an identical twin a clone is nothing but a separate organism created from the same dna it's an identical twin born at another time effectively now cloning when we've done sheep or other large mammals where you've cloned that dna from an adult animal it does tend to have some additional entropy attached to it and the clones don't have quite the same quality of life as the original copy there's still indistinguishable life and i have no problem saying that a human clone would have the same qualities of soulness as an actual human now a.i is a tougher question because an artificial intelligence would be different in pretty dramatic ways from a natural intelligence and to ask if an ai has a soul we have to ask well what's a soul in the first place when people say we have a soul are you talking about sort of an immaterial part of us a spirit some immortal unseen component of humanity or are you talking about the essential essence of something to get to the soul of the matter is the soul what is unique about you religious people tend to view souls as an immaterial part of a person perhaps even as the origin of consciousness non-religious persons especially science-minded folks tend to think of the soul merely as you know the unique qualities of a given person or thing how do we know that people have souls at all scientifically we don't no one's ever measured or captured a soul in any way there is some debate in philosophical and even the the neurological world about whether humans actually have you know even free will we've covered that on a previous show i'm not going to jump down that rabbit hole today you can see it in the show notes if you're interested in a deeper discussion on free will but regardless we can't prove or measure human souls we can measure the fact that humans appear to have consciousness that they're sentient and self-aware and that from that emerges something that other humans recognize as interesting and unique and curious and that the specific phenomena behind consciousness and awareness are not fully known or well understood in science today now let's talk about ai there's a few different ways you could come up with an artificial intelligence one is by emulating consciousness and consciousness in one measure can be defined as the ability of a given feedback loop to respond to the environment working off the insights of the physicist macheo kaiku here and he surmised that on some level of thermostat is conscious because it can become aware of its environment and respond to it in doing so it can change the environment and then respond to that change hence a feedback loop and in this model human consciousness is an especially elaborate set of hundreds of thousands of neuro feedback loops that coalesce to create our consciousness well we already have digital systems computer systems that have feedback loops and some form of limited consciousness there's banks of computers right now that are aware of the stock market that respond to changes that they create in the stock market and even has some very primitive forms of selection pressure on their algorithms to advance that's pretty amazing stuff you can imagine that if you allow these symbolic loops to amplify you could ultimately arrive at some form of consciousness and possibly therefore some form of a soul you could also imagine that the human brain is composed of matter that obeys rules neurons and synapses and if you kind of ladder down from the biology than molecules and chemicals and if you ladder down from that atoms later now further subatomic particles all these things are deterministic and behave according to rules some of which at the quantum level we don't understand all that well oh for that matter let's be honest uh there's a lot that we're pretty confused about at the neurological level as well but regardless theoretically one can create an emulation in software of all those real neurological parts and in fact this has been done at a very primitive level when researchers encoded a worms brain as a software application and with no programming put it into a robot and that robot immediately exhibited some environmental awareness the ability to sense when something was in front of it and try to navigate around it that is phenomenal it's a basic form of neural emulation in a machine so you could argue that uh that little robot was approaching a worm's level of consciousness now i don't hear a lot of people arguing that worms have souls except maybe buddhists and uh you know maybe some other animistic face but if computers keep getting faster we'll be able to build more and more elaborate models of brains within them at some point you can imagine and ray kurzweil certainly does in his singularity theory uh that at some point that you have enough emulation to make something human level aware now would that have a soul i think if we have souls uh something like that would too it would be gifted with an awareness of self and in fact uh alan turing came up with a test to surmise if a machine was intelligent enough it's called the turing test and basically if a computer can pass for a human in a conversation we have to assume that computer has a human level self-awareness and i think therefore a soul now again i'm not completely sold that humans have souls i know that comes funny from someone who follows jesus believes in god this is one of those places where my faith and my science don't line up all too well and i hold things in tension but i think yeah clones if people have souls clones definitely have souls if we can ever create a system that exhibits human level conversation ability if we ever create a system with a similar level of feedback loops and sophistication even if it's not necessarily all that conversational if we've got souls i think that system would as well really interesting question thank you [Music] hey mike this is brad question why is it that we as a human species are so quick to judge other human beings and how has that benefited us and how has that worked against us and then maybe a follow-up question how closely related is this to what we would call intuition how does intuition work and does it work or are we just always off thanks man well the voice you just heard was my good friend bradley grenin so i'm going to disclose he's a really close friend but i'm also going to let you know that i don't actually pick the questions that go on the show [Music] my intern haley picks the questions that go out for the poll and then the people that contribute to the program on patreon are the ones that pick the questions that make it onto the air so there's no inside baseball happening here if that term even makes sense i don't know anything about baseball but it is a good question and i'm glad uh that even though it was submitted quite a while ago it finally made it on the show uh humans are natural judging machines and this is for several reasons we are social primates we are in fact the most social primate based on our large you know prefrontal cortex large neocortex relative to the rest of our brain volume uh we're able to exist in larger social groups than any other primate chimps and bonimos of course come closest they can have troops of up to about 50 individuals but humans can easily scale to 150 friends right you have pretty large groups of individuals of course can humans can then do something called dunbar's number you know go to 500 individuals 1500 and then you know considerably less as the number of close friends you can have but because we're a social animal and our brains developed in that climate it is important for us to decide quickly who's in the tribe and who isn't because someone outside of our tribe can be dangerous pre-civilization especially in an environment of limited resources where we are competing for foraging resources for water and for a limited game with other bands of humans you gotta judge out if someone's in your tribe or not you've also got to judge whether someone is sticking to the tribal code the rules and we had to do that before we had language so you can imagine physical repercussions to a failure to comply with the rules of the tribe which were trained to children was vital to survival also knowing your social standing and the social standing of others is something that human beings devote incredible neurological energy to because to be higher in social standing is to have a better chance at mating securing resources for your children and to fall too low in social standing is to risk exile as is egregious infractions against the tribal code now once we you know gained language we gained civilization these quick judging habits didn't go away and they haven't gone away today we are still remarkably biased towards making snap judges towards other people and our experiences as children and even as infants play a remarkable role in the way that our brain judges other people for example young children and infants who are exposed to faces from a variety of racial backgrounds show less neurological fear responses to people that look different than their parents in other words their brain is more likely to initially accept people from other races childhood infant hood isn't that wild so yeah judging people has been successful for us evolutionarily speaking however when you grow to cities and nations and mechanized warfare and atom bombs and the power that humans have to inflict harm upon one another has escalated dramatically oh that judging doesn't seem to be quite as good a tool as it once was i hope society is learning and global violence rates make me think we are to some degree is learning to sort of moderate that judging impulse now intuition is actually related uh somewhat to judging and the fact that it's also a lower brain function your intuition is the quick thinking that presents itself to you emotionally to your consciousness that happens in your limbic system in the more ancient parts of your brain and that part of your brain is dramatically more efficient in terms of energy usage and time than your neocortical thinking your advanced human brain effectively the older parts of your brain are still around because they can make quicker decisions with less energy the problem with intuitive thinking or limbic system thinking is it works best with known circumstances your limbic system is great at making that snap decision to grab the softball before it hits you in the nose your limbic system is great for saying there's a bear i'm going to run i'm not going to contemplate the bear's mood or morality i'm just going to get out of here your limbic system is great for people predators and prey it's really good at you know figuring out the emotional states of others how they may respond whether you might be able to eat this thing you're looking at or whether this thing might eat you but your limbic system is terrible at particles and philosophy all the advanced thinking that we do your limbic system is not good at weighing ethical consequences or forecasting the future uh your limbic system's not even really good at language all those things are in the neocortex and are more expensive to run and so it's okay to trust your intuition to consider it as part of your experience especially when it's dealing with people you don't want to make intuitive leaps necessarily about science or higher order thinking issues you want to then engage your rational mind and frankly its ability to absorb information through language because no one person can puzzle through science on their own both of these things have served us phenomenally well and both of these things are also responsible for a tremendous degree of pain and suffering and conflict in human societies when our gut tells us to do something that doesn't really measure up to our higher ordered ethical considerations it might be time to check your gut especially when guns and bombs and police forces are involved it's those cases i think that it's most important to rely on the higher brain to moderate our ancient and more base impulses hi science mike i am curious about the science behind shame when adam and eve disobey god in the genesis story they become aware of their nakedness which makes them feel ashamed and their instinct is to hide i feel pretty confident that shane doesn't come from god because when adam and eve hide in the garden god doesn't distance himself from them he acknowledges the natural consequences of their actions and instead of shaming them he covers them but where does shame come from is it a natural consequence of sinning against a higher order or is it something we feel when we go against our own conscience or is it something that our surrounding culture projects onto us when we when we go against whatever is considered socially acceptable at the time and what do you think about people who feel the need to hide even though they don't feel like they're doing anything wrong like homosexuals who are in the closet or couples in a committed relationship who are having sex but aren't married or undercover doubters who still go to church and teach sunday school and lead small groups how should we respond to shame and what does it look like to extend grace well your question touches on two similar but neurologically distinct feelings one is guilt and the other is shame let's talk about the difference between guilt and shame before we dig into your questions guilt is moral feelings based on what you've done so you feel guilty when you feel like you've committed some undesirable or unethical or immoral behavior that's guilt guilt based on what you've done shame is feelings based on who you are okay guilt is what you've done shame is who you are i feel guilty if i stole a pencil i feel shame if i think my identity is that of a thief i'm just a worthless thief and that shame and though they do different things in the brain we've we've studied this i've got great links if you're into really in-depth medical research in the show notes on ask sciencemic.com for this answer but guilt and shame both involve your temporal lobe and your frontal lobe and your limbic system but shame also associates activity in the anterior cingulate cortex the part of your brain that's also responsible for love and affection perhaps because your shame is weighing the possibility that you could lose the love and affection of others in conjunction with the limbic system guilt tends to show a stronger activation in the amygdala the home of fear and anger in the brain now interestingly enough across cultures men and women neurologically expressed guilt differently women's guilt response is associated with the temporal lobe entirely while men show more frontal lobe activation which means men's guilt tends to be neurologically speaking a more analytical process a more weighing of what's wrong women's guilt tends to be a more social identity driven process which is interesting that there there really are measurable neurological differences in the way that men and women again across cultures uh process guilt so when we kind of look at those questions if you were to feel like you sinned against a higher order that would be guilt and yes feeling like you've broken a transgression against any kind of social code especially divine code is is a nat guilt and natural consequence if you go against your own ethical standards your own conscience that would also be guilt when culture puts something on you against what culture says is okay it could be guilt or shame depending on whether they're attacking the behavior or the identity so if we think about gay people in the church they are shamed in a lot of cases because they're told who they are is not right or not worthy right uh now some people say it's okay to be gay it's just not okay to express gay attraction or it's not okay to have a gay relationship and that starts to move the needle towards oppressive guilt instead of shame although i think you're still talking to someone's identity in that circumstance same with unmarried couples unmarried couples it tends to be more of a socially imposed guilt then shame because of course your your relationship is normal and natural and your desires are okay it's just your behavior that's wrong right so that's the guilt lever um doubters is gonna be a mixture of guilt and shame um because it's the question of who you are and what you're doing and all of this stuff is really toxic guilt can be healthy if you're genuinely doing something unethical guilt is a useful mechanism to encourage you to change in limited doses too much guilt is debilitating it drives depression it drives anxiety it destroys feelings of self-worth and ironically reduces your ability to uh have willpower and make change chronic shame the same way and this is important when we look at the origin of shame people who don't feel that they were fully loved by their mothers as infants and young children develop a condition called basic shame where they're unable to actualize neurologically speaking into a full sense of self-worth and these are people that are crippled for life and they're always going to struggle with anxiety and depression it it's not a destiny certainly but basic shame is a very troubling psychological condition and any of us can be pushed towards basic shame even if we were nurtured well as children by constant feelings of shame it's it's destructive to human life now how do we respond well a researcher named renee brown who's absolutely one of my favorite social researchers she looked deeply into the topic of shame and she found that the way to transcend shame is to be vulnerable it's to stop trying to hide those things you're afraid of other people finding out about you we hide things because we fear the loss of connection because we're social animals but when we lean into that fear and accept it and then reveal to others our inadequacies we become free from shame and more able to connect to people with intimacy more able to thrive to defeat depression and i've seen this in my own life i hid being an atheist for a long time and it was emotionally destructive and then i came back to god and i was afraid to tell people how my beliefs were changing but when i learned to reveal those things i was afraid to reveal i found greater intimacy and love and connection to other people on the other side and today i'm very very comfortable saying things that other people might not and that's been very freeing for me uh you know i have no shame or the fact that i don't have a college degree but host a science podcast it's just a thing right it's just another thing and ironically when you're the one who is open about your greatest weaknesses it removes the ability for other people to put guilt and shame on you because what do you have to lose when you have nothing to hide our last question came from the email inbox and it reads hi science mike first off thank you for all you do for the first time in my life i don't feel alone in my spiritual struggles on to my question i have always had issues with anxiety specifically as it relates to big life changes and also in terms of relationships i was wondering if you could explain the science of anxiety why it's so crippling and also suggest some resources beyond therapy since i already engage in that like books etc that are helpful in understanding and overcoming anxiety thanks again lauren anxiety happens when chronic stress ongoing stressors overwhelm your brain and encourage your limbic system to be in a constant state of arousal now the word arousal is so often used in sexual context that when i say that people think i'm talking about sexual arousal but i'm i'm just talking about elevated activity in your brain in the limbic system specifically so you have your limbic system your mammalian brain kind of your rat brain the inner parts of your brain then you have your neocortex the the human brain the most human the uniquely human part of your brain and anxiety keeps your amygdala and other parts of your limit system in a constant state of activation you're in an ongoing low-level flight or fight situation and that is crippling now i am not an especially anxious person on an ongoing basis like anybody else sometimes get tough i can have issues with anxiety but ongoing anxiety is something i don't have personal experience with so this is going to be relatively academic although i certainly empathize with you if you can imagine our brains and our lives our emotional capacity as a bucket just being alive is stressful you've got to find food you've got to get shelter you want to seek pleasure through human companionship and sex and food pleasure and you have all these impulses constantly driving you and you're looking for those things you don't get them that creates even more limbic system arousal but for a normal person you can imagine that this bucket is you know less than half full and that means in your emotional bucket you've got a lot of a lot of room for more water you can have a car wreck on the way home a fender bender and not freak out you can have an argument with somebody and it won't upset you those things are just adding more water now if you have your normal amount of water in your bucket and added stress every day if you have really difficult job circumstances or you've been fighting with your spouse a lot or you feel very lonely because you don't have a spouse and want one suddenly you can imagine your bucket is more than half full and that means you have less room for water and that means something else can happen and put you into an anxious state anxiety can activate because your bucket is almost full and this is describes people with very difficult life circumstances um things like if you've lost a loved one or um you have a sexless marriage or you feel like your life has no meaning or you're not getting enough sleep chronically that you feel very disempowered that you don't have any influence over your own life if you've got drugs and alcohol going on or you you feel like your finances are in terrible shape all these things can just add up and add up and put you into a state of chronic anxiety and once you're in a state of chronic anxiety there's no room left in your bucket and that means any additional stress melts you down you have a full-on breakdown flight or flight major reaction to things that other people in less anxious settings can cope with normally which makes you feel weird which makes you even more anxious that's terrible now believe it or not like right now i'm in that bucket more than half full space which is not usual for me i got a lot going on right now in this season of my life and i've definitely felt myself on the edge of anxiety for the last few weeks i've been taking some breaks from twitter as a result because you know it's winding down but i've still got you know a couple more months maybe of this uh very intense time period in my life and this is from just having so much on my plate i love this show i love talking to you guys love literature's podcast i love all the events i do i love the work that i'm doing but right now it's just there's a lot all at once and i'm as part of the next answer i'm going to talk about some of the things that i'm changing okay so i'm doing too many things that means i have a plan in the near future to do less right i have not been getting enough sleep for weeks and so i've made an intentional decision to get more i'm going to make sure i'm getting at least eight hours of sleep every day starting tonight as soon as i get done recording this podcast i've been cutting back on the amount of time i spend on social media other than when i launched the podcast you guys have probably noticed i'm not around very much right now that's because it's just another thing to track and take care of so when you are in an anxious state there's really just three things you can do you can actually change your circumstances you can take action to get more rest to eliminate stressors if you have a terrible job try to find a better job but what you're doing here is you're putting your health in front of the things you think you need are important that's not your only option you can also change the way you feel about yourself and your circumstances and i use cognitive behavior therapy to do that that's where i interrupt my own thoughts because if you have a constant like negative introspection and a worry about who you are and worry about how life is that's a stressor and so when i realize i'm doing that i stop myself and say no that's not true the the cognitive behavior theory idea is that your thoughts can lead your emotions your emotions can lead your thoughts but if you make a choice to think differently your emotions will follow over time and so when i start to freak out and think i'm never going to get all these things done i stop myself in my mind and i say but you can get some things done and some things are better than nothing and then i work on something and i have a phenomenal work output with nothing but that little cbd trick right well when i think oh you're going to run out of good ideas how can you answer all these questions on your podcast every week i say there's no pressure to do anything but give your best answer right there's no there's no failure all you can do is give your best answer that's cognitive behavior therapy now the third thing you can do to deal with anxiety is accept the things that can't be changed i have to pay a mortgage or not have a house i just accept that i don't rail against it i just roll with it so we sort of think about three things again change your circumstances change the way you view yourself or your circumstances and then accept the things that you cannot change and all those things help you deal with anxiety now you're doing a good thing seeing a therapist i might talk to your therapist about cognitive behavior therapy if you have not already it can be extraordinarily helpful in dealing with anxiety and depression and other emotional issues that can be difficult to defeat and also listen i found just a fantastic webpage by the anxiety specialists in the uk that summarizes some approaches to anxiety and some of the science behind it that really helped me even craft this answer it's linked in the show notes at ask sciencemike.com could be a good resource and i'll see if i can find a book on cognitive behavior therapy that i like to post there as well because that could be helpful and i'm sure if you specifically ask about cognitive behavior therapy with your therapist he or she will have some resources for you as well anxiety's tough it really is i know people i'm close to people who deal with chronic anxiety and i understand how debilitating that it can be so i would encourage you to do everything you can to take care of yourself worry about yourself right now and return to a place where your bucket is not so full [Music] another week another episode of ask science mike thanks for tuning in and listening i honestly i i'm amazed every week i look at the reports on the show we have more listeners in the week before it's a popular podcast that ranks consistently in itunes about science and faith questions it's crazy you guys are awesome uh on podcast news specifically uh our most recent episode i mentioned it a little bit the beginning of the show of the liturgist podcast it's another show i do with a friend of mine named michael gunger we just did our 20th episode of that and it's on lgbtq equality and the church don miller came on brought his friend jj matthew vines joined us stan mitchell and melissa greene and one of their church members tabitha from grace point church in nashville tennessee came on the show ed gunger joined us it's an absolutely phenomenal episode it is the most downloaded thing i've ever been a part of except maybe you made it weird with pete holmes um but uh it's probably gonna end up in that uh in that ballpark if the downloads keep going like they are i don't care what you think about marriage equality you owe it to yourself to check out that episode there are some amazing stories and perspective which can be found at the liturgist.com podcast speaking of the liturgists we're going to be in atlanta for an event called belong that we're putting on for just a hundred people we've sold out most of the tickets but there are a handful left so you can join us if you go to liturgist.com slash belong and grab a ticket we're also going to be at the wild goose festival this year both the liturgists is going to be there and i'll be there doing a talk on the science of peacemaking and actually for the rest of the year i've got a pretty decent number of events lined up and more being added all the time if you go to mikemcarg.com events or just go to asksciencemike.com and click on events you can see where you might be able to catch me in person i would love to see you keep 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original music recorded produced he's your guy you can make it happen you can learn more about greg and jeb and get resources for every single question asked on the show at ask sciencemike.com say it with me now thanks for listening guys i'll see you next week [Music]