The Only Way to Verify Robot Self-Consciousness Would Be to Become a Robot

Mankind is getting better and better at making robots. Before many decades we should be able to create robots that can converse with us with what seems like a large amount of intelligence. But will such robots be self-conscious? That, as they used to say decades ago, is the $64,000 question.

In this discussion by self-consciousness I mean an inner self, an inner life, an inner stream of consciousness similar to the inner life led by a human. I do not simply mean the ability of a robot to recall or process some information concerning the robot or its previous interactions. A robot that can describe itself and list all of its previous decisions or visual inputs is not at all self-conscious unless it has some kind of inner self and inner life like we have.

Some people think that once a robot has the ability to pass for a human, it must have self-consciousness. The underlying reasoning may go something like this:

1. We are self-conscious
2. If robots could talk as well as we can, their minds would be at least equal to ours
3. Therefore such robots would also be self-conscious

But such reasoning is flawed. Self-consciousness is the crown jewel of the human mind. The fact that a robot might have other information processing capabilities equal to ours does not necessarily mean that it would have self-consciousness. It is important to distinguish between two different things: intelligence and self-consciousness. A robot can have a high degree of intelligence without any self-consciousness at all.

If you doubt this, consider an ordinary computer program. The average complex computer program has a degree of intelligence, a certain amount of smarts. By intelligence I simply mean the ability to process inputs in some rational way, producing some reasonable output. But there is not any computer program that has self-consciousness in the way that humans have. From a self-consciousness standpoint, every computer program ever written is as insentient as a stone. Even programs that run on supercomputers and perform millions of calculations per second have not even as much self-consciousness as you have in your sleep.

You know yourself to be self-conscious, but how can you be sure that the people you see every day are also self-conscious (rather than just phantoms or illusions with no real inner selves)? Perhaps you cannot be 100% sure that they are self-conscious, but you have a good rational basis for inferring that they are. The people you see with your eyes are other beings who look pretty much like you, who had an origin similar to yours, and who are made of the same materials that you are made of. So it is quite logical for you to infer that they are self-conscious just like you are. But such reasoning completely fails in the case of robots. Robots may one day look like you, but they will always be beings that originated in a completely different way than you originated, and also are made of materials vastly different from the materials in your flesh (plastic and steel being very different from protoplasm and bone). So it would seem that we might never have an adequate basis for inferring that robots are self-conscious.

Let us imagine an advanced robot which looks like a human, which moves around like a human, and can talk very well with a human being. The robot is capable of sparkling conversations. We can imagine three different possibilities:

1. The robot has no self-consciousness at all. Destroying the robot is no more of a murder than destroying a car. Any impression that the robot may give that it is self-conscious is a mere illusion, the product of clever programming.
   
2. The robot is fully self-conscious. It is a person with an inner life and inner self just like you and I. Destroying the robot would be as much of a murder as killing a person.
   
3. The robot just has a dim trace of self-consciousness. Imagine your self-consciousness during one of those very rare times when you lay asleep in bed, but realized (just before waking up) that you were sleeping. At that point you had a minimal dreamy fragment of your normal waking self-consciousness. It could be that the robot has that type of minimal self-consciousness.
   

The problem is that we would have no way of ever knowing which one of these possibilities is the truth. We can't find the answer by simply asking the robot. Asked about his self-consciousness, robots will give whatever answer they have been programmed to give, or they will say they don't know, or they will merely guess.

To ask a robot whether it is self-conscious is to ask it basically: do you have an inner life like my inner life? But the robot will never have lived a human life, so it won't be able to answer, unless it guesses at something it doesn't really know about.

But there is one way that you might be able to verify that an advanced robot of the future really is self-conscious. You might verify such a thing if you actually became a robot.

This possibility has been discussed in the context of mind uploading. One day there might be some machine that scans your brain, and somehow extracts all your memories and transfers them to a computer inside a robot.

Now imagine you paid for such an operation to be performed. You go to a medical center and are put under anesthesia. You then wake up with the body of a robot. You move your robot arms, and through your robot eyes you see your former human body (possibly dead) lying on an operating table. You also have all your memories, and your self-consciousness.

Then you would truly know that robots can be self-conscious just like humans. But maddeningly, you would never be able to prove this to a human who had not undergone such an operation. Any human who had not undergone such an operation might still maintain that you were a robot without real self-consciousness, who had merely been uploaded with the memories of a human. You would know that this was untrue, but you would be unable to prove it to others.

But such an uploading may be impossible to ever achieve. So humans may never know whether the sophisticated human-like robots they create are truly self-conscious entities with inner lives, or merely souped-up adding machines who fool us into thinking they have selves.

8 Ways We May Be Regarded by Future Generations

How will the current generation of humans be regarded by future generations? Let us consider a full spectrum of possibilities.

They may view us as sluggish airheads

Before long parents may be able to take advantage of gene-splicing and genetic enhancements that can enhance the human mind. If such techniques are used over enough generations, we may see the evolution of a much smarter human race. Einsteins may be as common then as texting teenagers are today, and there may also be many super-Einsteins.

If this happens, future generations may look back at our generation and regard us as slow-paced dolts. They may ask themselves: how did these airheads ever manage to invent the Internet? They may also regard it as a major miracle if our generation somehow manages to avoid blowing itself up or destroying itself through technological or environmental folly.

They may view us as geniuses

Suppose, on the other hand, that there is no such great blossoming of human intelligence. Suppose that we merely see continued progress in automation and computers. It could be that the teaching of mathematics is dropped from elementary and high schools, or limited to be only a subject taught only to very enthusiastic learners who request it. This outcome is all too plausible. One can imagine parents saying, “Why are you torturing my child with algebra when Google will solve almost any math problem for you instantly for free?” The same thing could happen with computer programming courses: they could be dropped if we ever figure out how to make computers that can program better than humans.

In such a case it could be that the human brain gets a little soft and spoiled from not having to work so hard. The average human IQ might actually drop a little bit, and it could happen that some future generation regards us as the geniuses. In the year 2150 people might say, “I can't believe how brilliant people were back around 2015 – they actually had to learn geometry and trigonometry all by themselves.”

They may view us as disgusting savages

We regard the people who lived five thousand years ago with a certain level of disdain. We might refer to such people as barbarians or savages. They may have had a certain degree of civilization, we think, but they weren't really civilized.

But that's exactly how people living in the future may regard us. In the future, all people might be vegetarians who regard meat-eating with disgust. Such people might look back on us and say to themselves, “I can't believe people actually ate their fellow mammals back in those primitive days.”

Future man may also abolish war. If war is ever abolished, future generations will look back at all the wars fought in the past 100 years, and regard the humans between 1913 and 2013 as bloodthirsty savages. One can only imagine the history books of the future: “Before man became truly civilized, he engaged in the fruitless fratricide known as war.”

They may view us as zombies

In his sprawling online manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative, the philosopher and futurist David Pearce has imagined a future in which humans experience super-lives filled with super-pleasure, based on chemical and brain enhancements which dramatically improve our well-being and the richness of our emotions, as well as our capacities for appreciation. Pearce rhapsodizes here about the possibilities:

(S)he might then hear, and have the chance to play, music more exhilarating and numinously beautiful than his or her ancestors ever dreamed of; the celestial music of the spheres heard by privileged medieval mystics will be as a child's toy tin-whistle in comparison.... Erotic pleasure of an intoxicating intensity that mortal flesh has never known will thereafter be enjoyable with a whole gamut of friends and lovers.....A painter or connoisseur of the visual arts will be able to behold the secular equivalent of the beatific vision in a million different guises, each of indescribable glory....States of divine happiness orders of magnitude more beautiful than anything the contemporary mind can access will pervade the very fabric of reality in generations to come. Even the most virile of imaginations can apprehend in only the barest and formal sense the ravishing splendour that lies ahead.

Imagine if something like this comes to pass, and most humans get drastically enhanced emotional capabilities. They might know not just love but Super Love, not just joy but Super Joy. Such humans may regard our generation as a race that can barely even feel anything. They may regard us as kind of zombies, vacantly stumbling through life without any real appreciation of things.

They may view us as lucky ducks

If things go bad future generations may regard our generation as the most fortunate of all generations. There are many possible scenarios for how things might go bad: we might run very low on oil; we might suffer the effects of a nuclear holocaust; we might lose all our electricity in an electromagnetic pulse event (caused by a nuclear bomb in the high atmosphere or a very bad solar flare); we might suffer an economic collapse like the one that almost occurred around 2008.

If any of these things happen, future generations may regard us as people who were living in a kind of golden age. They may look back on us and say: “Those people in the early 21^st century – they had it made in the shade. Plenty of energy, a moderate climate, electricity available to anyone, free internet downloads –no generation ever had it so good.”

They may view us as slaves

In the future automation and robots may lead man to an Age of Leisure. The four day work week? Instead it may be a three day work week or a two day work week, and quitting time may be at noon. Or instead of a single weekly Day of Rest as in the nineteenth century, there may be a single weekly Day of Work. It's possible that almost all work will be assigned to robots and machines.

If that happens, future generations may look back on our generation and think of us as corporate slaves. They will read about our work habits: working at least 40 hours a week, and often as many as sixty, as well as working fifty weeks a year, from age 22 until age 65. They may regard us with the same kind of pity that we feel thinking about the cotton picking slaves of the Old South.

They may view us as saints

In the future social mores may change. Monogamy may be regarded as an outdated relic of the past. The average citizen may have multiple spouses, or may engage in sexually promiscuous swinging behavior, cavorting with multiple sexual partners at the same time, including both human partners and robot partners. In addition, there may be a legalization of many drugs that are now prohibited.

If this happens, future generations may look back at our largely monogamous and hard working generation, and regard us as being saintly paragons of virtue. They may ask themselves: how did that generation ever keep trudging so tirelessly down the straight and narrow path?

They may view us as selfish narcissists

Another possibility is that future generations may look back on us as self-centered egomaniacs. They may look at how we let global warming get worse and worse, while we were busy engaging in environmentally destructive conspicuous consumption, largely so that we could add another “look what I bought!” Facebook update to make a fleeting impression on our social network friends. They may look back at how we spent much more time posting online pictures of ourselves than we spent worrying about how to stop environmental decay that led to the extinction of countless species. They may then regard us as the “me first, Earth last” generation.

A narcissist's favorite painting

Give the Earth a Christmas Present by Giving Nobody a Christmas Present

Yesterday was Black Friday, the traditional first day of the Christmas shopping season. But before we rush to buy Christmas presents for our friends, we should consider: what is the environmental cost of our holiday habits?

One of the world's great environmental problems is overconsumption in developed countries. We in the United States consume at a wasteful and excessive rate that is causing various forms of environmental problems.  Among the problems of overconsumption are the following:

1. Global warming. Almost every thing that we buy and consume requires energy use which contributes to global warming. It uses up energy to manufacture goods that you see stocked on department store shelves, and it requires energy for the items to be transported from the factory to the store. If you then send a package that travels quite a distance, that will require an additional energy expenditure. Since almost all energy in the United States is currently created by oil, gas, and coal, this energy use ends up contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which makes global warming worse.
2. Trash accumulation. Americans generate an average of 4 pounds of trash per person per day. The accumulation of this trash is a horrendous environmental problem. Christmas gifts have a higher-than-average likelihood of being discarded, for the simple reason that so many gifts are just wild guesses about what a person wants. Even if you ask a person what he wants, he will often say, “Oh, I don't need anything.” Then you end up guessing about what the person wants. All too often the person getting the gift will just toss it out, thinking, “How could he have thought I wanted that thing?”
3. Resource depletion. Resource depletion is a huge environmental problem on the same scale as global warming. We may soon reach peak oil (the point at which the global demand for oil exceeds the supply). Peak coal may occur within a few decades. Forget the old canard that we have hundreds of years of coal. More recent estimates are much gloomier, suggesting that production may plummet after a few decades, with one study suggesting US coal production may have already peaked. These facts are relevant because almost every thing you buy at a department store required the use of fossil fuels for it to be manufactured, and the supply situation for fossil fuels is troublesome. We should save our fossil fuels for things we really need (such as feeding and heating the world), rather than using them for some fancy Christmas gadget such as a waffle maker that someone will use only a few times. There is also the fact that within several decades we are expected to run out of several important metals. We should not be using up metals for gifts that people aren't likely to use much.
4. Pollution. Besides global warming, there is the fact that the manufacture of goods helps to produce smog. Today a large fraction of the goods bought in the United States come from factories in China. But Chinese cities are facing horrible smog problems, partially because of all these factories. That shopping cart full of gifts may be helping to hurt the lungs of the Chinese.

This year, give the Earth a Christmas present by giving no one a Christmas present. Or, give Christmas presents only to small children. Adults don't need the items typically bought as Christmas presents. Adults need a healthy planet that offers clean skies, moderate temperatures, and ample supplies of energy and metals, rather than a smoggy, trash-filled, depleted planet that is running a fever.

But, you may ask, what can I put under my Christmas tree? There's a simple answer: don't buy one. When the planet needs every tree it can get to soak up our global warming pollution, there is no sense in the custom of cutting down a tree every year to put in your house for a month. This year rather than having a tree cut down so you can have it in your house, you should instead plant a tree. 

 Christmas trees are green, but Christmas usually isn't

Wind World: A Science Fiction Story

Young Cheros had never seen the sky, nor had any of his friends.

Cheros lived on the first planet of a distant solar system. The planet was tidally locked, which meant that the gravity of the nearby sun held the planet in a vise-like grip. The same side of the planet always faced the sun.

Defying incredibly long odds, intelligent life had arisen on this planet. But long ago the inhabitants of the planet had abandoned the surface, and moved underground. The reason was simple: the very high winds on the surface of the planet. Because one side of the planet was very hot, and the other side of the planet was cold, there were incredibly strong winds always rushing between the hot side and the cold side, as hot air followed its natural tendency to move into colder places.

After putting up with the continual annoyance and danger of the planet's high winds, the civilization on the planet had finally decided to move everyone underground. Great underground cities were built, along with vast hydroponic gardens. The cities were powered by geothermal energy.

There was only one legal way to see the sky, and Cheros wanted to take advantage of it.

“Let's go wait in line to use the periscope,” said Cheros to his lady love Luta. “I've never seen the sky before.” He was referring to a tube-like viewing apparatus that had been constructed to allow underground citizens to see the planet's surface, without risking their lives, like submarine captains looking at the surface of the water above them.

“We tried to do that last year,” complained Luta. “The lines take like...forever.”

Cheros finally persuaded Luta to wait in line with him in the long line to use one of the periscopes. Finally his turn arrived. He looked through the aperture of the long tube-like device, and was able to briefly look around the surface of the planet above him. But it only lasted a few seconds.

“Hurry up, it's my turn now!” said the next person in the long line.

“It was so beautiful!” enthused Cheros. “I saw the sun, the clouds, and the surface of the planet. I've got to see it again.”

“I'm not waiting in that line again,” said the lovely Luta. “It was too long.”

“No, I don't mean that,” said Cheros. “I mean, I want to actually go on to the surface.”

“You're crazy!” said Luta. “That's against the law.”

“Laws were meant to be broken,” said the adventurous Cheros.

Cheros thought long and hard about a plan to get to the surface. After exploring around, he finally found a metal tube that seemed to lead to the surface. There was a sign in front of the tube:

EMERGENCY SURFACE ACCESS TUBE

FOR USE ONLY IN CASE OF FIRE

UNAUTHORIZED USERS WILL BE JAILED

Cheros brought his lady love Luta to the tube.

“Let's go up that tube,” said Cheros. “It will be so wonderful when we get up to the surface. For once in our lives, we'll be able to breathe fresh air.”

“It's too dangerous,” protested Luta. “You know the winds on the surface gust too fast. That's why our whole culture moved underground.”

“Darling, you said I wasn't romantic enough,” said Cheros. “So now I'm being romantic. I want to take you to the surface, and give you a kiss underneath the sun and the sky. This is our only chance.”

Luta finally gave in, and they both climbed up the metal ladder in the steel tube. They opened a round access door above their heads, and climbed on to the surface of the planet. The wind was blowing furiously, but it was only a moderate annoyance.

The young lovers looked around, astounded by the beauty of the surface and the sky above them.

“You see that?” said Cheros, pointing to the sky. “That's a cloud! A real cloud. Isn't it beautiful?”

“And look at that round thing,” said Luta. “It's the sun! We're seeing it with our own eyes!”

The lovers gave each other a romantic kiss. They started to walk around a bit, to get some rocks that they could take back as souvenirs of their visit.

But then an enormous gust of wind arose, and lifted Cheros far up into the air, like a leaf being blown from the ground to far above the treetops. 

Knocked over by the blast of wind, Luta looked up and saw Cheros for the last time. He disappeared, carried way up into the sky by the mighty wind. When Luta last saw him, she saw only a little speck high up in the vast sky. It was as if the clouds had sucked up Cheros, so that he could live among them.

“Farewell, my darling,” sobbed Luta. “Farewell forever.”

Weeping at her loss, Luta returned to the metal access chute, and sadly climbed down the ladder, back to her underground city. She vowed never to return to the dangerous planetary surface again.

What Any Human Should Be Thankful For

As today is Thanksgiving, today's post will be brief. Let me list some things I am thankful for, and that any human should be thankful for.

I am thankful that there is Something rather than Nothing. After all, absolute eternal non-existence (no God, no particles, no universe) is the simplest imaginable state of existence (having zero details), so it's quite the mystery why that wasn't the case.

I am thankful that the Big Bang started out at just exactly the right rate, so that the universe didn't end up either collapsing into black holes or expanding too fast for galaxies to form.

I am thankful that the long series of physics coincidences described here came to pass, so that organisms like us humans could be around to enjoy a warm summer day.

I am thankful that we have not yet been destroyed by a wandering rogue planet, nuked by a nearby supernova, destroyed by a Yellowstone Park volcanic eruption, vaporized in a nuclear war, or destroyed by aliens, as described here.

I am thankful that somehow there arose on our planet thinking beings with inner selves, rather than mere philosophical zombies interested only in food, sex, and self-preservation.

I am thankful for the sun, that marvelous thing we all take for granted, but which could not exist (at least in its current form) if any of 5 or 10 cosmic physics dice had rolled ever so slightly different.

I am thankful that I live on a planet of moderate temperatures with plenty of greenery and water, rather than an ice planet, a water planet, an arid planet, a planet with crushing gravity, or a tidally locked planet, as discussed here.

I am thankful that the world has love, beautiful music, and beautiful colors, as very well exemplified in the high-definition youtube.com clip below.

Prize Song from Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg

Darwinism is Good, But Fails to Explain Man's Higher Faculties

The main principle behind Darwinian evolution is the principle that organisms tend to gradually evolve characteristics that give them a greater survival value in their environment. This principle allows us to explain many facets of humanity, particularly everything underneath our necks. We have arms and hands because we are descended from species that used to live in trees, and needed arms and hands to swing from branch to branch. We have legs capable of running fast, because we needed those to escape from predators. We have good vision because we needed that to find food and spot predators. All of these things can be explained through the principle of natural selection – survival of the fittest. Most characteristics of a species that make the individual members of a species more likely to survive (until they reproduce) can be explained by referring to natural selection and evolution.

However, there are some important aspects of human nature that seem to be difficult or impossible to adequately explain by using an explanation of evolution and natural selection. Humans have inner selves and personalities. Humans are great at language, and at formulating very abstract ideas. Humans are capable of wonder, joy, love, guilt, compassion, imagination, and spirituality. Humans can create art and literature, ponder their own deaths, wonder about the meaning of life and the nature of the universe, create and follow moral codes, and consider philosophical matters.

It is hard to explain any of this by evoking evolution or natural selection, because most of it has no survival value, from an evolutionary standpoint of making an organism more likely to survive until it reproduces. 50,000 years ago a human who felt wonder by looking at a sunset was not any more likely to survive than a human who did not (in fact, the sunset-appreciating human was actually less likely to survive, as he might let down his guard and be attacked by a predator while he was enjoying the sunset). We can't explain the origin of man's talents at art, philosophy, mathematics and literature by imagining that such talents evolved because people who had them were more likely to survive until reproduction.

Darwinism is bad at explaining these things.

Imagine you're a cave man 50,000 years ago. Life is pretty simple: find food, don't freeze to death, and don't get eaten by a predator. People at that time had no need for language, math, art, literature, planning abilities, or inner thoughts. Grunts and hand signals would have worked just fine to alert your fellow cave man when you see a predator. So how did man get all of his higher faculties that have allowed him to create art, novels, science, philosophy, and government?

At the John Templeton Foundation website, there is a page in which professors and experts attempt to answer the question, “Does evolution explain human nature?” The short answers given by a panel of professors and experts run the gamut:

Obviously, says the monkey.

Except where it matters.

Quite well.

Not entirely.

More fully by the day.

Not yet.

In part.

Yes.

Only up to a point.

Yes, but...

Totally, for a Martian.

Yes and no.

That's a spectrum of answers, but when we look at the answers in detail, things don't go too well for those trying to answer the “Does evolution explain human nature?” question affirmatively. The expert giving the answer “Obviously, says the monkey” loses his credibility by making the ridiculous claim that humans “have no basic wants or needs that cannot also be observed in our close relatives” such as chimpanzees. I guess this fellow has never heard of the desire to obtain truth or the need to make a lasting accomplishment or numerous other wants or needs that humans have and chimps don't have. His “man is just a chimp” reasoning fails to persuade.

Another expert who answers “Yes” to “Does evolution explain human nature?” then undermines his own answer by saying this: “Why there is subjective experience at all - is actually a mystery. Only a few Darwinian thinkers, such as Steven Pinker and the late John Maynard Smith, have appreciated this problem.” So if that's true, then it's not right to answer Yes to the question “Does evolution explain human nature.” This is the “hard problem of consciousness,” and there is a confession that “only a few Darwinian thinkers have appreciated the problem,” which sure doesn't sound like evolutionary theory has a real answer for it.

The typical evolutionary explanation involves random mutations and random variance plus survival of the fittest. For example, imagine a population of early humans. Because of random mutations and random variance, some of the population would by chance have longer, stronger legs. Then more of that population would survive because those organisms could run faster to escape predators. That works fine for explaining the evolution of certain physical characteristics of the human body, and also some parts of the brain involving human perception.

But the same type of explanation would seem to be impotent and useless for explaining some higher faculties of mankind – simply because we would not expect that any random mutations or random variance would ever cause some early humans to have a slightly higher amount of such faculties. It would not seem that random variance or random mutations could cause a certain number of early humans to be a little more capable of love, guilt, language, mathematics, self-introspection, philosophy, inner lives, spirituality, wonder, or advanced moral concepts. It almost seems to require a kind of quantum jump to go from an animal mind to a mind capable of such things. Can we really imagine that a random mutation or a random variance would cause an organism to have a little bit of an inner self when its parents had no inner self?

Evolution is a fact, and we know that man is very old and the universe is much, much older. But nevertheless we have a problem in explaining how evolution could have produced all of human faculties. Among the possible ways to explain this discrepancy are as follows:

1. There might have been some extraterrestrial interference in human evolution which led us to develop some of our advanced faculties.  Our evolution could have been altered by visitors from another planet.
   
2. Evolution might have been assisted by either a divine influence, or by some unknown insentient force of nature that we do not currently understand.
   
3. There may be some philosophical explanation for the origin or existence of advanced human faculties, perhaps something along the lines of a philosophy that grants consciousness more of a central role rather than making it a mere by-product of unconscious natural processes. It could be that mind comes before matter, rather than the other way around.
   

I'm not sure what the answer is – perhaps one of these three, or perhaps something else. I do think that evolution is overall a fine theory that explains much. But champions of evolution may be hurting their own cause when they try to make it look as if evolution can explain the entire human mind. When advocates of a theory claim too much for it, they may make it more likely that someone will reject the theory altogether.

Rather then pretending we have most or all of the pieces of nature's jigsaw puzzle, we should admit that we have only a few, and that our knowledge of nature is only fragmentary.

Reddit Science Wants an Echo Chamber Comfort Zone

Reddit.com is a hugely popular web site where users can submit links to articles and posts they see on the web. There are numerous different “subreddits,” each of which deals with some particular category such as Sports, Politics, or Science. If readers like a story, they can press an Up button that causes the story to get a higher ranking on the list of top stories listed by a particular subreddit. A very-liked story may rise to the top of the list on a particular subreddit.

One of the top subreddits is Reddit Science (www.reddit.com/r/science). There are some good articles, posts, and links. However, this subreddit has a very strange posting policy, which seems to be quite antithetical to the true spirit of science, besides also being offensive from the standpoint of simple common sense.

Below is the posting policy currently stated by Reddit Science:

Please ensure that your submission to r/science is :

1. a direct link to or a summary of peer reviewed research with appropriate citations. If the article itself does not link to these sources, please include a link in a comment. Summaries of summaries are not allowed.
   
2. based on recent scientific research. The research linked to should be within the past 6 months (or so).
   
3. not editorialized, sensationalized, or biased. This includes both the submission and its title.
   

Each one of these guidelines is very inappropriate. I'll explain some reasons why.

The first requirement is inappropriate because it straight-jackets a person wishing to discuss science, by limiting him to merely making a “summary” of a paper by another scientist. In many cases, an appropriate response to a scientific paper is not to merely make a summary of it, but to challenge it, interpret it, or to point out that other scientific papers have reached contrary conclusions.

Below are some examples of some scientific papers that should not have been merely summarized, but which should have been criticized, discounted, interpreted, or otherwise handled.

A recent scientific paper claimed to have discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life in the upper atmosphere. Was it appropriate to merely summarize that sensational claim? Of course not.

Another scientific paper claimed that the genetic code used by earthly life “displays readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality,” thereby implying that either God or extraterrestrials somehow tinkered with the genetic code. Was it appropriate to merely summarize that sensational claim? Of course not.

Every year there are numerous scientific papers reaching a conclusion that some type of food or other item used by humans causes some type of medical problem, whether it be heart disease, early death, cancer, or whatever. Should such a paper merely be summarized? Of course not. The reason is that in a large fraction of cases, there are conflicting scientific papers reaching the conclusion that there is no such causal relation between the food or other item and the medical problem in question. So it's entirely appropriate to criticize a study that reaches conclusions in conflict with other studies.

Every year cosmologists release many papers advancing all kinds of highly speculative theories, which are normally called models within the papers. The next time a cosmologist publishes such a paper, is it appropriate to merely summarize his speculations? It is is often better to call attention to how speculative the model is, and how other scientists have different theories.

I may also mention that an intelligent discussion of science requires "big picture" looking at the larger trends and wider implications of science, not just a narrow small-scale discussion of individual scientific papers.

So Reddit Science's first requirement (“summaries only”) is very inappropriate. What about Reddit Science's second requirement, that there should only be posts about research done in the past six months? That is also inappropriate. It encourages a mentality in which previous research is put on a hallowed pedestal and “set in stone,” no longer subject to dispute and debate. Why discourage someone from making a critique of research just because it appeared more than six months ago?

What about Reddit Science's third requirement, that posts about science should not be “editorialized”? This is also inappropriate. Part of the scientific process of discovering truth involves criticizing or discounting previous work. But that involves stating an opinion, and that's editorializing. If a scientist publishes a paper that is speculative, poorly supported, or in conflict with other papers, it is entirely appropriate that we should “editorialize” by criticizing that paper.

Let us also consider the fact that scientific research can sometimes lead to gigantic perils for the public. An example is the creation of thermonuclear bombs, which put the whole human race in danger of extinction in a nuclear holocaust. Another example is a recent real-life paper suggesting a new way to modify a pathogen to make it vastly more deadly, capable of killing very many millions of people. In both cases (and in many other cases) any responsible treatment of such items calls for “editorializing” about the need to limit the dangers. “Check your moral concerns at the door” is not how we should be dealing with science.

The Reddit Science submission policy is a prescription for an authoritarian “filter bubble” or “echo chamber” – an environment in which the original research or speculation by a scientist is repeated uncritically by writers afraid to challenge it or compare it or dissect it.

Below is a satirical statement of the impression created by the Reddit Science submission policy. It isn't quite their policy, but it sure sounds like it:

Click to expand parody