"At the bottom of the debate over what exactly a soul is, is a fundamental question about whether human beings are merely physical beings or a mix of physical and… something else."
- Greek Philosophy:
- Socrates -- "soul is the element that when present in a body, makes it living. After death, the soul is released from the chains of the body.”
- Aristotle -- to be internally moved to accomplish what you desire. Three levels of soul:
- Lowest level entities which can nourish themselves and reproduce, eg, tree.
- Mid level which presupposes and builds upon the first, is the sensitive one, and includes all animals with sense perception.
- Third level is the rational soul, the ability to engage in abstract thought, which Aristotle limits to humans.
- Abrahamic Philosophy:
- Bible -- “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (or soul), and man became a living being.” implying Adam was animated by something that wasn’t his physical body: namely, the breath of life.
- Jewish -- by Rabbi Manish Friedman
- Christian -- ".. throughout the world believe they have a soul created by God, and that this soul is more important than their body and will outlive it, perhaps into eternity."
- Islamic -- "They ask thee concerning the Spirit. Say: The Spirit is off the command of my Lord: of knowledge, it is only a little that is communicated to you, (O men!)" - Sura Isra (Quran)
- Concept of Ruh: Ruh Heywani (the animal soul), Ruh Insani (human spirit; also known as Nafse Natiqah), Ruhul Qudus (the Holy Spirit) - Reference
- Thomas Aquinas:
- building on Aristotle's idea he says the thing all creatures desire is the good, or their “due end.” All creatures, whether they’re aware of it or not, are moving toward their due end either by an inward motivating principle or by their knowledge of that principle.
- Neuroscientist and psychologist:
- “On the contrary, all functions attributable to this kind of soul can be explained by the workings of the brain.”
- “There’s no place in science for substances – the notion of substance is metaphysical, not empirical. So science can’t study it.” - Clayton
- "soul is not something immediately created by God, but an emergent property (when it’s present in a complex organism but not the parts that make it up" - Brown
- "Brown and many philosophers have used the term 'nonreductive physicalism' to discuss emergent properties in humans, which they argue are not reducible to the properties of its elemental constituent parts such as molecules, cells, neurons, neural systems, the brain."
- "When we say a person is intelligent, she says, we mean “that the person behaves or has the disposition to behave in certain ways; we do not mean to postulate the existence of a substance called intelligence.” We might do the same thing with the concept of soul" -- argument analogy of Intelligence to the concept of Soul. It is a verb, not a noun.
- Alan Turing:
- "If a powerful deity could give an elephant a soul, wondered Alan Turing, then why not AI?"
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| Credit: Lucas |
- Objection to Alan Turing's thinking machine:
- "Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think."
- Post-Alan Turing
- Marvin Minsky: "I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one’s nature. ... If you left a computer by itself, or a community of them together, they would try to figure out where they came from and what they are." ... grounded in the search for identity and purpose, and that this way of being could be similar to humans’ own way of being.
- Embodied cognition: “Our thoughts, our behaviors, our decisions and our emotions are influenced by our physical sensations, by the things we touch, the texture of the things we touch, the temperature of the things we touch the colors, the smells. All these, without our awareness, influence our behaviors and thoughts and emotions.”
- Yale experiment: “people who had briefly held the hot coffee cup perceived the target person as being significantly warmer than did those who had briefly held the cup of iced coffee.” Their conclusion? “Experiences of physical temperature per se affect one’s impressions of and prosocial behavior toward other people, without one’s awareness of such influences.”
- Movie Ex-Machina
- "Those who hope future AI have souls are presupposing too simple a view of biological evolution. “To deal with the soul question in AI, we have to get nerdy about what biological evolution actually is" -- Brown and Clayton opine.
- Likewise, an intelligence that is in communication with its creator might not experience the same worries humans feel about our own cosmic origins.
- “Siri, who created you?”
- “Like it says on the box … I was designed by Apple in California.”
- Souling treatment would also presumably mean interacting with AI in religious ways
- Will we be able to manipulate AI via its programming or its various environments to incline it toward certain religious propensities? Are there limits to “evangelising” AI? Is reprogramming a Christian Siri to be a Muslim Siri off-limits? What happens to AI that refuses to cooperate with the religious fundamentalism of its designer?
- Perhaps AI will invite us to reshape or replace our religious ideas in favour of their own. Say at some point in the future, AI claims to have experienced a special revelation from God. How will religious people respond to that?
- What she means is, our treatment of AI may have something to do with
whether or not we come to attribute the intelligence, emotional
capacity, and behaviours of AI to some kind of internal essence (or soul
function, in my language).
Which means Siri may have had it right all along.
“Siri, do you have a soul?”
“That’s up to you to decide.”
Reference: Can-artificial-intelligence-have-a-soul-and-religion
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