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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

ELIZA could be made to believe in God.

Being made to believe in a god isn't the same as believing in one.

Silicon Valley thinks AI is not an epistemological problem, as if neurons can be perfectly simulated atomically and that all intelligence processes can be categorized as structured vs. unstructured. Very naive conclusions.

Ironically, they BELIEVE if you simulate the axiomatic neuron perfectly, emergent properties of intelligence will mystically emerge after some undefined threshold of complexity. They are permanently unable to simulate the two billion years of neurological evolution and natural selection for such a belief to hold.

If you must emulate human intelligence, you must be able to navigate the realm of distilling reality from the overlap between truth and belief. Mocking how humans observe reality isn't enough.

Abrahamic religion explored the alternative intelligence problem in great depth over two thousand years ago. It's a pity the results have been lost to Progressive axe grinding.

For Artificial Intelligence to believe in God would be for it to believe in its makers, which are human. A machine would be intelligent to be aware that it was made by man.

A man doesn't need to believe in God to be intelligent. In fact, the two are pretty much inversely related.

Believing in a god is unique to the human species. No other animal does this. Thus, if you want full and complete simulation of human intelligence, this is the ultimate benchmark to test against.

Furthermore, the purpose of this thought experiment is that you CANNOT know what god an AI would end up believing in. That should make you rethink everything you think you know about theology and reexamine it under epistemological terms

>Believing in a god is unique to the human species. No other animal does this.

Do you have some evidence of that? And even if it's true, is it the only thing that's unique to humans?

Indeed, I suspect the interesting part of "believe in god" in terms of intelligence is probably "construct narratives". Assigning a high probability to those narratives reflecting reality (i.e. believing) seems like an aside to the main complexity involved.

>"The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee." - Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe

The best case for animals demonstrating religious behavior (which is fundamentally different than believing in a god, mind you) is from a very convoluted interpretation of a food coma.

http://bigthink.com/videos/can-animals-be-religious

Outside of that considerable stretching, it doesn't exist. Also, I challenge your premise that conflates "belief" with "constructing narratives"

Do you believe you will be alive tomorrow? If so, are you constructing a grand-weaving narrative... or simply making a singular belief? Or, more simply, are you just extrapolating off of past experiences?

>Also, I challenge your premise that conflates "belief" with "constructing narratives"

I didn't conflate belief and narratives, I conflated belief with assigning high probability to those narratives. Sure, there are also simpler predictions we can estimate as well, but I think the thing that makes "belief in god" interesting from the perspective of judging intelligence is the complexity of the narrative.

>Outside of that considerable stretching, it doesn't exist.

What evidence would convince you that an animal "believed in god"?

To kill two birds with one stone, as soon as animals demonstrate something more akin to tribal-level human behavior of religious worship (the grand fusion of self, environment, social, and mystery into the realm of higher powers that must be feared) and not postmodernist definitions of worship (the grand disconnection of the self from all other factors to appeal to an idealized self that can never manifest thank you CIA involvement in the postmodernist art movement and their unique ability to capture scary mommies everywhere) then I'll consider the idea that animals are demonstrating religious behavior.

And further more, if animals DO have religious behavior, then artificial intelligence research across the entire board is WOEFULLY inadequate to represent such a core part of the neurological interaction that generates religious behavior... a core behavioral capacity that was somehow missed in every single behaviorist research paper ever published since mankind mastered animal husbandry.

You either get in bed with the idea that only humans worship gods or you have to fundamentally throw all of psychology, sociology, and animal behavior studies completely out the window.

Do you alone in the world know what animals are thinking?

I provided the very best and most recent research for the absurd position that animals supposedly have their own animal gods, attend regular communal worshipping ceremonies, engage in animal religious ritual, and demonstrate religious behavior outside of a priori instinct and social fitnesses.

You provided... passive aggressiveness.

And if animals now engage in religious ritual, doesn't that make them stupid for not being atheist like you? I expect several YouTube videos of you trying to convert your cat into the enlightened ways of post-theism.

> I provided the very best and most recent research for the absurd position that animals supposedly have their own animal gods

You did nothing of the sort. You provided a link to a video of an anthropologist describing chimpanzee behaviour and indulging in a little light speculation about why they're doing what they're doing.

Nobody is claiming that animals believe in god(s), rather I'm disputing your bizarre assertion that you know that they don't. There is no way to tell.

>For Artificial Intelligence to believe in God would be for it to believe in its makers //

That's a very limited sense of the idea of a god, and certainly doesn't match with definitions of God [a singular, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, deity] that I've come across.

Merely making something doesn't make you a god, not even if that thing appears to display intelligence. Some sense of one of the characteristics of existing in a separate spiritual realm, having power/knowledge beyond that possible in the present realm, having an existence that's not bounded (eg physically) within the normally experienced space of the "mortals". They seem like a start for basic level definitions of a god.

> A man doesn't need to believe in God to be intelligent. In fact, the two are pretty much inversely related.

Claiming as fact. Citation, please?

There are a lot of very smart people who are at at least Deist levels of faith. I'd say it's orthogonal. An example? C.S. Lewis.

There is nothing wrong with that sort of metaphor, no matter how much stress you place on it. If you think of religion as a technology, then it can be abused but the abuse doesn't mean it's bad.

Or Donald Knuth.

> Abrahamic religion explored the alternative intelligence problem in great depth over two thousand years ago. It's a pity the results have been lost to Progressive axe grinding.

I'll take the bait: What in the world are you talking about?

What is monotheism but a comprehensive collection of thought experiments regarding the behavior of a Bronze Age singularity? :D

Bash script can be made to believe in god. )

Obviously a bash script should believe in God. All it has to do is look around itself at the complexity of it's world and conclude God must exist. I plan to shred any of my bash scripts that do not figure this out within their useful lifetimes. I will print out and file the ones that do. I've written a long text file which explains this in terms a bash script can understand and left it globally readable on my system.

... or at least root...

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