Certainty (-5 to 5): -2
Ever watched the show A.I by Steven Spielberg? Do you believe that Artificial Intelligence is possible? What I mean is that one day we would be able to create life, real life that thinks and has free will.
I am convinced that one day this is a certainty. This is because I believe that our intelligence came about through natural causes (evolution). I believe that if we recreate the same steps that created us, new sentient life can emerge. My confidence comes from the twin enterprises of genetics and computing. While this process should be much more complicated and take much longer than one usually imagines, I still think that is possible.
Edmond (a philosopher friend) believes that AI is incompatible with Catholic beliefs, for God is the creator of life and we are not God. I think he might be a little too fast in saying this. It is possible that by giving us free will, God has given us the ability to be like God, and thus to create new life. Another possibility is that God has guided our hands in creating this new life. Thus, should AI one day be created, Catholics might still be able to reconcile this with their faith. At this point, the existence of AI appears neutral with regards to the question of whether God exists.
But imagine that we could arbitrarily create life, with varying abilities - some with incomplete intelligences. Imagine a race of slave robots that are semi-intelligent. Imagine that instead of robots they were flesh and blood beings. Remember the restaurant at the end of the universe in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? In it a sentient cow asks the protaganist which part of the cow he wants to eat and starts to promote the different sections of its body. It explains in a bored voice: "Don't worry. I've been bred for this purpose. I'm happy to give up my life for your dinner. Now, the sirlion.. i must say, what a choice.."
Is such a being even possible? If it is, it does goes against the idea of a God that is loving and just. I don't believe that if a sentient race of aliens existed God would prefer Humans over them and give humans dominion over them. Instead, all sentient life appears to be equal in the eyes of God. The possibility of "semi"-sentience and the arbitrary creation of life thus opposes such a concept of God.
Another way of looking at it is to say that the soul appears to be created by evolution. If we understand 'soul' here to mean the same thing as minds having consciousness and rational thought, then evolution does seem able to explain how the human mind, or 'soul', came about. Pope John Paul says that evolution can be accepted as creating the human body, but not the human soul. The possibility of A.I. contradicts the idea that the soul comes from God, since we can create and manipulate these souls arbitrarily.
...click below for full text
No comments:
Post a Comment