Ray Kurzweil
Kurzweil Technologies. Google
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Ray Kurzweil is an engineer and inventor who argues that mental processes are computational and that computation does not care what implements it. In The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Viking, 1999) he sets out the law of accelerating returns and attaches dated forecasts to it, running from the 2000s to the end of the century, in which brain scanning, whole brain replication and non-biological minds arrive in a fixed sequence.
The relevant claim for this site is the one about substrate. Kurzweil holds that once a brain’s organisation is captured in sufficient detail and executed, the result is that person. He writes about it as an engineering roadmap rather than as a philosophical argument, which makes the dates checkable and the metaphysics thin. He does not resolve the branching problem and he does not give a theory of how organisation produces experience.
Kurzweil is an engineer and a forecaster rather than a consciousness researcher. His claims about consciousness are predictions about when society will accept machine minds, and those predictions have a track record that can be audited. That audit is more useful than treating his book as a theory.
Known for. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), the law of accelerating returns, and dated forecasts for machine intelligence
Coverage on this site
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Ray Kurzweil is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.