Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!husc6!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: jmoon@lehi3b15.csee.lehigh.edu (Jonggu Moon [890911]) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: if ( ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ) then SOUL:= EXISTS; Message-ID: Date: 27 Aug 90 02:20:34 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: CSEE Dept. Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA Lines: 51 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I'm reading the book "Go:del Escher Bach" by Hofstaeder and reached the part about artificial intelligence and sentient beings. According to him, there are two schools of thought about AI. Against: AI will never reach true sentience because true sentience requires a "soul" that imparts purpose and awareness of self into the brain. For : AI will someday be able to create sentient beings because purpose and awareness of self are just complex algorithmic processes that happen to be out of reach of programmers for now. Against: Sentience requires a soul and only God can create a soul. For : A person does not have and does not need a soul. And if he did utilize something that seemed to be a soul, AI R&D will eventually be able to isolate it and dupliated it. Against: One example that machines will never be sentient is that now, a computer would be happy to do a calculation over and over again without complaining. But a person would eventually be able to step back and realize the futility of an infinite loop and stop. For : That is not a good example because computers are too primitive now. But when memory size becomes sufficiently large enough and the CPU becomes sufficiently fast enough the computer would become sufficiently sophisticated enough to be sentient. Also, who is to say that we humans are so sophisticated ? What if God exists in an environment as far removed from our reality as our reality is removed from the computer program's environment ( the operating system ). If that is the case, then we ourselves could be caught in the occasional infinite loops of life and not realize it. Without God's intervention, we would continue to execute a function over and over again without complaining because we do not have the ability to realise it is a repetative loop. ^>*<^jon [As I'm sure you know, there is no agreement among Christians about what the soul is and where it comes from. There is a movement in 20th Cent. theology (which seems to have been at least popularized, if not created, by Nygren's book "Agape and Eros") that believes the soul is not something separate from the body. There is some evidence that this is consistent with the use of "soul" at least in the OT. If this is true, then conceivably an artificial entity might have a soul. Second, some traditional theories of soul have said that while the body is created by biological processes, at some crucial point God creates a soul for the new person. There is nothing to prevent him from doing so for artificial entities. --clh]