What would you do if one morning you woke up and you knew nothing of your life previous to that day, and you had to re-learn what it meant not just to be a human, but to be you again. But is that even possible? What is it to be you? Can that be relearned, or is the process of many years of doing what you do to become you something so unique that like fingerprints no two are the same.

In watching Kyle XY, I’m supremely intrigued by this idea of what you would do if you had to try and figure out who you are and learn what it is to be human. I think to myself, this is one of the biggest challenges that we have had in terms of building artificial intelligence, we don’t know what intelligence really is, to be you. How do you tell something that you just created (similar to just waking up one day at the appeared age of 16 and not know anything before the minute or second that you woke up) how to be aware, how to think, how to understand?
We take for granted this process, thousands upon thousands of children have been born and raised by adults, and yet we have no idea why that process works, and how we can replicate that without the aid of millions of years of evolution helping us along the way. While the core of a computer can respond to something in a millionth of a second, a computer can’t learn something that it hasn’t been taught, and everything incurrs a certain degree of logic that must be adhered to. How do you then tell a computer to take something that is apparently unlogical (such the Spock reference!) and interpret that in any other way than Null Pointer Exception (just using an NPE as an example, but basically anything that results in an exception being thrown because 2+2 now doesn’t equal 4.
I think we pride ourselves as human begins as being the masters of our own universe, of our own domain. And we use science or constructs such as mathamatics to explain the physical and meta-physical world around us in ways that we otherwise might not be able to explain. But do all things in nature follow these natural rules? It begs the question–are humans the exception to the natural order of things? Lets look at this in further detail. If we use a Carl Sagan like example of evolution, as he describes in The Cosmos, then at some point in our evolution man took a separate path that over millions of years resulted in who we are. But out of the billions of billions of cells and species, why is it that our species is the only one to have decided to take that course? Why is it that sharks still look like sharks from millions of years ago–wouldn’t they be far superior to us if they had just decided to “wake up” and mutate to the point where they could use their brains in similar ways that we do?
But more to the point if we defy the natural order of things by not conforming to our surroundings like every other occupant on this little blue planet in the middle of our galaxy, are we really ones to try and understand how things work? Aren’t we already starting off the beaten path, so to understand the world around us is pretty much like a dog trying to learn how to fly? We put a man on the moon (assuming the popular belief that we did), and yet we have no idea how we can think. We have this inner drive to learn more and more about what’s out there in the vast universe–to ask and answer the question, are we alone in this universe, but in introspetively speaking, we have little to no fundamental understands that will help us know how we are who we are and how we can replicate that in other ways. If we could get a computer to think like we do, how will that change who we are and what we do?