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Comment by panza | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for other denominations, but in Catholic philosophy, it's not so much a case of whether it attains consciousness (whatever that may mean now or in the future), but whether it has a soul.

From that perspective, no, machines cannot be baptized, nor can they be Christians, and Jesus cannot save them (because they are not fallen).

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Interesting. Did Neanderthals have souls? We know we interbred with them. The question is then whether earlier hominids also had souls. Was "ensoulment" a gradual phenomenon or did it arise spontaneously? If it was gradual does it mean at some point there was a "cross-over" period where we interbred with soulless hominids? Interbreeding becomes philosophically awkward if ensouled and non-ensouled beings could mate and produce offspring. I don't think it's clear at all even what has a soul and what does not.

This is what's called "Majoring in the Minors" in Christianity. Neanderthals are no longer around. What's important is treating humans with a special dignity. If you start equating humans with anything else, like plants or animals, you get nihilism at best, and atrocities at worst.

All living things have souls. For most Ur-Platonists (which includes nearly all orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, and pagan Greek and Roman philosophers/theologians until the Enlightenment), the soul is:

* what makes a thing what it is (it's form/eidos/essence/universal/nature)

* what makes a thing a living thing at all

* what unifies and coheres the many disparate parts of a living thing

The relevant difference between those of us with human natures and those beings who lacked human natures is that our human nature (i.e. our souls) has the power to come to know universals/natures/forms themselves (albeit imperfectly), whereas other beings do not. For a dog, their senses are acquainted with many instances of cats, but they never are able to go from these individual sense impressions to the form/nature/universal of cat, or ficus carica, or what have you.

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