Spiritual machines?

[Guest]

athiest,

Assuming the future does hold such legal issues quite frankly I don't see how we can over come the cost of creating such a being. I would be willing to bet R&D cost alone would be in the billions of dollars. I also don't see industry buying such a product to replace humans.

Second do you think it is ethical to create competition for our species, especially in light of the enviromental problems we are facing now?

Jim

[Guest]

If the future however, does run contrary to your prediction will you think less of religion or will you remain sceptical about the cognition of those machines?

As my Grand-daddy used to say, "I'll burn that bridge when I get to it."

At this point, such "human" machines only exist in your imagination, as you would say that God only exists in mine. Since I believe that man has a spiritual aspect which transcends the material world, any attempt to manufacture "human" machines will be clever mimicry. Nothing more.

[Guest]

Good points, Jim and Mort! I heartily concur! The only reason I can think where a business would want to use "manufactured people" to replace the real thing would be the military. But even then, the military would not want to use MPs if they had the same needs and weaknesses humans do. You'd be looking at something very different from human beings if the military went that route.

TK, if a clone has the exact DNA of another human being, wouldn't that make the mother and father of the original human also the mother and father of the clone? This is a weird discussion . . . interesting though!

What I find harder to figure out is what if genetic tampering created beings that were half human, half beast or half human, half plant? Would you treat such beings as having souls or what?

[Guest]

Hello, RO,

Thank you for your posting!

Perhaps science will allow for the possibility, but I'm uncomfortable with your statement, nonetheless. Wouldn't that give humans god-like ability that God Himself has not given us? And isn't grabbing for what God does not choose to give us what caused our fallen states to begin with?

I agree with you that it is important to be sensitive to the danger of overstepping God's will. This can be more challenging in areas like this one, where there does not appear to be a commonly accepted revelation on the matter.

However, I appreciated Jim's argument above that human creation in the image of God includes our reflecting his creative ability. For what it is worth, I do not see it as given that our fashioning sentient beings would fall outside of what God has given us. At the present stage of technology, we already make and do many things that past generations would have considered god-like.

And as it is, humans already make sentient beings all the time. They're called children - and they are a scary and awesome responsibility. But if God did not intend for us to participate in the creative process of new sentient beings, then he would not have allowed for us to choose our reproductive partners. After all, it is our choice in mates that yields the genetic combination that creates a new person. Which is not to deny God his creative role in human reproduction ... but similarly, it would be arrogant to assert that if humans designed sentient mechanical beings, God would have no participating role in their creation, either.

Thank you again for your thoughts, RO.

Shalom,
Emmet

[Guest]

Hello, Homer,

Thank you for your posting.

If the machine has a short circuit and blows a fuse are we morally obligated to fix it? If we don't like it (say it was like Hitler) do we have to "resuscitate" it? Would it be OK to smash it rather than fix it? After all, it could be put away in a box for 100 years and some one might come along and "resurrect" it!

These issues are not all that different to their parallels with human subjects. It would seem to me that with sentient machines we would essentially be dealing with matters of capital punishment and rights to medical treatment.

Thanks for your questions!

Shalom,
Emmet

[Guest]

Hello, Jim,

Thank you for your posting.

Assuming the future does hold such legal issues quite frankly I don't see how we can over come the cost of creating such a being. I would be willing to bet R&D cost alone would be in the billions of dollars. I also don't see industry buying such a product to replace humans.

For what it is worth, if natural resources elsewhere in the solar system (or beyond) become important to Earth's economy, then sentient machines might become desirable contributors to our society. Humans do not do well long-term under the physical demands of space, and machines could be designed to work/harvest under conditions that humans could much less hope to endure. To get all sci-fi for a moment - if an energy source were located on a moon of Jupiter, the technical demands of constructing and operating a harvesting project might be better accomplished by mechanical people.

On a second point - if the American work ethic continues to slide, then industry might have to produce mechanical people in order to get good workers . After all, we can't outsource everything to India! [But the problem, of course, is that by the third generation mechanical people will become slackers, too - playing their X-boxes and knocking back the Havoline High Life.]

Thank you for your thoughts, Jim.

Shalom,
Emmet

[Guest]

Hello, again, RO,

I'm tagging in tardily, here -

What I find harder to figure out is what if genetic tampering created beings that were half human, half beast or half human, half plant? Would you treat such beings as having souls or what?

I like the question.

What is a soul, and how do we know that humans have them?

Thank you for raising the question.

Shalom,
Emmet

[Guest]

I'd like to point out you're slightly wrong that the a naturalistic worldview implies causal determinism. Recall the Heisenberg Uncertainty Priniciple. The Universe at its very core is not wound up and predetermined. There is uncertainty woven into the very fabric of reality through all the Quantum Mechanics phenomena that we register. Therefore even 100% artificial machines cannot be said to be 100% deterministic.

In my opinion, the "uncertainty principle" basically tells us more about ourselves than it does about particles. We do not have the technology to determine where the particle is at any given time. We may be uncertain, but that doesn't prove that the particle is neither here nor there.

But even if it is true that particles move in a random way, and this motion is uncaused, that would in no way be related to beings being aware of themselves and the world around them. Indeed, self-aware beings seem themselves to be the cause of some events. The events caused by such free-will agents are not random events.

[Guest]

Paidion,

In my opinion, the "uncertainty principle" basically tells us more about ourselves than it does about particles. We do not have the technology to determine where the particle is at any given time. We may be uncertain, but that doesn't prove that the particle is neither here nor there.

Actually, a particle is clearly "neither here nor there". There are modern setups of the double slit experiment that plainly show that a single electron takes TWO paths simultaneously until quantum decoherence occurs. The "Bell's inequalities" argument is a rock solid proof of that as well. It is the ultimate test which showed that Einstein was wrong in saying "God does not play dice with the Universe".

ndeed, self-aware beings seem themselves to be the cause of some events.

What do you mean by that? Self aware beings can only cause events if they act upon the material world. Are you perhaps refering to the idea that "consciousness causes Quantum decoherence" (aka the Spiritual Interpretation of QM)? Well, it is a valid philosophical stance but there are other interpretations that may have just as valid a premise, for example the Many Worlds interpretation.

As for the "ultimate free will" argument? Well, I am not sure what free will is supposed to be or how we test for its existence but in my world view I believe that decisions we all make are an integration of our sensory inputs, our memories, our brain structure and in small portion the natural quantum randomness of the universe. However, I believe the latter is only a tiny infulence on our thought process. In other words I do not subscribe in to Stuart Hameroff's idea of a brain as a Quantum Computer.

[Guest]

Atheist,

I know this is more so about robots developing consiousness and self-awareness, and what this would mean for Theist's. Yet I have some material that is intriguing. See for yourself.

Evidence from Psychology
By Bob Enyart

As a believer in God, I have often stated that everywhere you look everything you ponder provides evidence for a supernatural Creator regardless of how unlikely the thing you consider. How do we test this claim? We check to see if even apparently improbable issues are explained well by theism or by atheism. So, to see if we find evidence for a supernatural Creator even in the most unlikely topics, I submit to you: [ZQ10-7] Dirty Jokes. On two occasions, I publicly sparred with The Man Show host, now with ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, calling him a crotch humorist and pointing out that TV’s old romantic comedies mostly have been replaced by genital comedies. Unlike animals, human beings have a sense of embarrassment about various bodily functions which humor can exploit. Why do people commonly laugh and feel uncomfortable in public regarding reproduction and expelling waste? If human beings were not at all spiritual but strictly made of matter, consisting only of atoms and molecules, then we would have no context from which to view our base bodily functions as funny or embarrassing. So we theists describe both human and animal behavior as an expected function of our worldview. Since animals do not have spirits, they have no context from which to be embarrassed about relieving themselves or reproduction, and readily do both in public. A male horse pulling a carriage of tourists in Denver will defecate in front of his favorite mare and the rest of the world, while a human being would die a thousand deaths emotionally before doing likewise.

Humor requires degrees of truth and the unexpected. A popular comic has noted that when we knock on restroom doors, we often hear the occupant say, “There’s somebody in here.” Somebody? As in somebody else? Since a restroom is primarily for our basest bodily functions, we tend to distance ourselves from its use and even refer to the facility as though it is for resting or bathing. We speak of heart doctors, ears, nose, and throat specialists, eye doctors and even brain surgeons, but we disguise experts in our most embarrassing function by calling them proctologists, so well veiled that we don’t even recognize the Greek root of the title. If we called him a crapologist, no one would take the job. A slight reference to the function in public can get a frown or a laugh out of billions of people. Yet a dog in heat cares nothing about witnesses; monkeys make no attempt to hide their private parts; and a statue at the center of attention will get covered in bird droppings. Mark Twain critically observed in Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897, ch. 27) that “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

Everything, even dirty jokes, provides evidence for God’s spiritual realm. And again, atheism cannot directly explain even one of all the observations ever made, while all those same observations are themselves ready and direct evidence for theism. Thus in this debate Zakath the atheist is on the defensive and tries to run away even from scientific discussions. Human beings have a spiritual dimension and thus we do not have a matter-of-fact attitude toward our lowest material functions. If you could teach a dog to laugh, you couldn’t get him to laugh at fire hydrants or reproduction, because he would have no frame of reference from which to consider such things funny or distant. But spiritual beings could look with surprise, shock, and embarrassment, the stuff of dirty jokes, upon their physical selves. Actually, to introduce this matter, I have simplified the issue somewhat, for the derivative of the word psychology does not come from the Greek word pneuma for spirit, but from the word psyche for soul. Life is more complicated than just matter and spirit, for man is body, soul, and spirit. Both scientific observation and religious writings indicate that animals are not simply made of matter, but they also have souls, which enables them to relate to one another. The souls of men and animals do not exhibit identical capacities, and even the souls of different animal species enable different degrees of social and even rudimentary emotional capacities for relating to other animals and to man. As relationships have a greater value than chemical reactions, soul is a higher function than body. And as a relationship with a spiritual (supernatural) Creator is the greatest possible relationship for a creature, spirit is a higher function than soul. Only humans exhibit evidence of having an eternal spirit which observations are also consistent with the most common religious view. Thus the species of Homo sapiens possesses the widest context from which to distance ourselves from various bodily functions, and as those functions become most base, we have the context to view them as virtually foreign from our true identities.

We conceal reproduction and the expulsion of waste (which even prostitutes and pornographers do in their private lives), and then we also cover our nakedness with clothes, and reside in private domiciles. We get married in the most public of ceremonies and then live in extremely expensive privacy. As a group, the most progressive liberals could have billions of dollars extra to use toward meeting other needs if they did away with expensive private accoutrements like clothing and bedrooms. And if atheistic evolution were true, especially indoors, the universality of clothing itself is difficult to account for and should be easily discarded. Even nudists use private restrooms and claim to conceal their sexual behavior from relatives and other onlookers. In rejecting God, an individual or societal conscience can be seared and values lowered. So tribesmen can adopt minimalist clothing and condition their women to go topless, but missionaries find that women in such cultures readily reassert their modesty. Behaviors that are characteristically human, which are unlike those in the animal kingdom from which we supposedly evolved just a short time ago, testify to a morality of human nature imposed upon us by the Creator.

Now let’s move from jokes to fears, specifically, fears of the dark, of ghosts, and of the dead. We humans differ from animals in strange quirks which theism readily explains. Evolution supposedly selects so well for survival that human brains advanced quickly to now process quadrillions of instructions per second. Yet if atheism were true, then natural selection has introduced the most backward oddities only among human animals. According to Isaac Asimov, the human brain “as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe” (Asimov, In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even, Smithsonian, August 1970, p. 10). And yet people, the greatest supposed achievement of evolution, are the only animals that are afraid of the dark, afraid of spirits, and afraid of dead bodies. A little mouse moves about fearlessly at night. A fish calmly sniffs at the recently deceased corpse of its own mother. No snake is afraid of ghosts. Yet human beings have an uncanny fear of these which we overcome to varying degrees. But why do these experiences exist for humans and not animals? Why? Because human beings, being spiritual as well as physical, are inherently aware of the spiritual realm, the domain beyond death, of spirit beings, the realm that cannot be seen with the eyes. Such physical experiences remind us of that realm when we are in the dark and confronted with a reality which we cannot see, and when we think of the spirit beings who inhabit that realm, and when we come in contact with the remains of another person who has departed from this life into the next. For a dead body is the closest physical connection we have with the afterlife. Such behavioral evidence further distinguishes humans from animals and provides additional evidence for mankind’s reasonable and unshakeable belief in the afterlife. For if God put an eternal spirit into man but not into animals, we could predict that animals will not behave as humans do regarding the dead and the unseen. And even the atheist exhibits such fears, not being able to shake his own awareness of the spiritual realm. Again every single observation ever made provides direct evidence against atheism and for God.

Atheists of course will always attempt explanations. “We fear a dead body because whatever killed it may lurk nearby to kill us.” Or, “Fear disguises our sadness at losing a loved one.” But these do not explain our eerie feeling if we happen to stumble upon an old human skull. Some atheists may even deny that such fears are a common part of the human experience, but just hold a discussion with a random test group, about spirits, in the dark, at night, in an old cemetery. Yes by training or repetition people can overcome such anxiety and atheists can find one in a thousand people who will deny ever experiencing such creepy reactions. But then, let him find one in a thousand cows that show such fear. So my theistic worldview would predict and directly explains these broad differences in behavior between trillions of non-humans and their billions of human counterparts, while atheism fails to account for any of it, tripping up even over dirty jokes and universal fears, requiring secondary and tertiary assumptions, along with a boatload of completely unimaginable factors in which they nonetheless implicitly trust.

A human can experience a fear of the dark and want to quickly switch on a light even when walking through his own familiar bedroom, even when sure that nothing is amiss and without worry of any intruder. Humans have a fear of spirits, and commonly, even those who do not believe in ghosts get readily spooked in so-called “haunted houses.” (I know; I saw more than 30,000 people pass through one that I worked in run by Youth for Christ’s Campus Life high school ministry in New Jersey.) If evolution simply produced such universal fears of the dark, and of ghosts, and of the dead because they are valuable for survival, then why produce them only in humans and not in countless other species? Of course, God could have created animals with such instincts, but not doing so helps men see the uncrossable divide between us and animals, and helps deter even depraved men from modeling animal behaviors such as eating their own young. Compared to animals, humans have both noble and evil distinctions that atheism cannot account for, like our greater intellect, depth and breadth of personalities and emotions, our standing erect which gives us an upward heavenly gaze looking toward the immeasurable Creator, and even our sinful flesh. For the bigger the man, the harder his fall, and to whom much is given, much is required. And thus compared to animals, it is mankind that has the extraordinary capacity for evil. So the unknown, the unseen, the spiritual, the dead, all strike a chord that resonates uniquely throughout mankind. For if God made us with a spiritual dimension, to have an awareness of a spiritual life after death, then we should expect such behavior.

Psychology leads us also to consider beauty. Can we accurately reduce the recognition and appreciation of beauty to simply a ploy of evolution. Or is beauty independent of any human or biological observer? Atheists have claimed that evolution produced the beauty in flowers, butterflies, and peacocks; but what of the splendor in snowflakes and galaxies? The universe is filled with evidence that beauty exists independently of biological observation. The beauty of deep sea plants and distant nebulas awaited discovery by man. If beauty does not exist independent of man’s observation, then it does not exist as evidence for God, but if a mountain stream or a wheat field is objectively beautiful, then God exists. The atheist can tell his wife she is not truly beautiful, or he can mimic the Christian and tell her the truth.

I took a class in Artificial Intelligence at Arizona State University in which I wrote a software program that could play chess. Also that semester we looked at vision systems which began my own continuing consideration of beauty. The appreciation of beauty is a spiritual function not attributable to matter. Albert Einstein in his 1944 Remarks on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge wrote of “the gulf -- logically unbridgeable” between ideas and matter referred to by some linguists and scientists as Einstein’s Gulf. Atheists are impotent to explain anything at all, and are especially unable to explain how the universe can begin with matter alone and develop to where knowledge is possible. They attempt to defend their atheistic worldview with knowledge, ideas, reason, science, language, and logic. But nothing inherent in matter should reliably give rise to any knowledge whatsoever, and especially not to beauty. For information science shows that knowledge does not arise nor increase by chance. And if any atheist thinks otherwise, then produce the proof discovered since Einstein which shows that knowledge can arise from matter.

Beauty is not purely subjective to biological life. The innate beauty intrinsic to the animate and inanimate world testifies to us of a Creator who appreciates that delightful quality of things which possess a harmony of form, color, texture, and perspective, things which show originality and excellence of craftsmanship, all within the right setting. For we find beauty in a sunrise but not in a rotting corpse, in a soprano’s voice but not in a man’s belch, and in the eyes of a child but not in the droppings of a pig.

Human observations provide evidence of purpose. We analyze our temperaments and so classify ourselves as introverts and extroverts, thinkers and feelers, detail-oriented and big picture types, planners and doers. Our population is filled with these fundamental characteristics in proportion. Since opposites attract (remember the Creator made both physics and romance), we have equal numbers of opposites and so as an extrovert I could marry a wonderful introvert named Cheryl. Clinical research shows that 2/3s of men are thinkers and 2/3s of women are feelers, meaning that men act more upon rules, and women act more upon relationships, giving us again a fine-tuned symbiosis. Thus men build bridges across rivers, and women build them across generations. And speaking of rules, atheistic feminists say that men made the rules of traditional morality in order to keep women down. But if it were up to the average man, society’s morals would force women to go naked, and instead of faithfulness in marriage, the Ten Commandments would insist upon promiscuity. And if men made up the rules, why is it that men are less virtuous than women? Just look at the jails, unfaithfulness, addiction, crassness, and murder. Sadly, as our society increasingly rejects belief in God, this gender gap narrows as women become less feminine, and we see the atheistic feminization of crime, infidelity, alcoholism, perversion, rush hour, and suicide.

Just as no conceivable process can account for consciousness, i.e. self-awareness, arising of itself from matter, neither could personality and emotion so originate. Logically, the effect cannot be greater than the cause. Our consciousness comes from a self-aware Creator who made us. We are persons, with personality, because He who made us is a personal God. And we have emotions because He can love and hate. Emotions do not arise from chemical reactions, as though mixing a compound in a test tube for an eternity could produce envy or hope. Of course, since emotional beings can express their conditions emotionally, then we can emote our reactions to substances like alcohol or adrenaline, but it is naïve in the Einstein sense, “which separates the world of sensory experiences from the world of concepts” (ibid), to say that such substances produce the emotions. Chemicals do not feel anxiety. To get to emotion, requires personality, and to get personality requires a Person. Thus the evidence points not only to God, but it shows us what kind of God He is. He is not just a cosmic energy source, nor an impersonal organizing force. For neither a Duracell battery nor an Oracle database could ever produce a happy or sad personality. Since we have personality, it is rationale, logical, and utterly scientific to conclude that the cause of our existence is a personal God (just as Pasteur scientifically concluded that microbial growths came from unseen microbes). Atheists reject the Creator apart from any evidence and out of an unprovable, pre-existing bias which they typically refuse to show as falsifiable, leading them to irrational, illogical, and unscientific theories which defy every single observation ever made.