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Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a hobby interest in theology:

Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists.

There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing about superintelligent AI.

The key message I want to deliver to people is:

A) Philosophy is not such a trivial thing that you can just wander in, "be a smart guy" and find flaws in established philosophical arguments.

B) AI has real theological implications, and everyone is tiptoeing around it. More than one public intellectuals are trying to smuggle their own metaphysical positions into the public consciousness via discussion of AI.

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Interesting points. Can you share some thoughts about the theological implications of AI? Interested to hear.

Peter Thiel famously went to the Vatican and started giving lectures about AI and the Antichrist. Pretty rich for a guy who built his billionaire fortune on an AI-powered spying company.

The most obvious one is the "god of the gaps" problem now applied to intelligence. If you look at things like Aquinas' Summa Theologiae [1] you'll see that there are explicit assertions that things like rationality transcend corporeal nature. As such the more examples we have of AI behaving in rational ways, we will be forced to conclude that either rationality does not transcend nature (removing the last remaining gap where we can invoke a supernatural explanation) OR that we have created artificial souls.

[1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm

I think theologians will hang on for a while saying "what AI is doing isn't really rationality". But eventually the theologians are going to face a reckoning: what AI is doing will look so much like rationality that they will be required to answer the question "what specifically differentiates the two?" and then they will be stuck. Neuroscience does not understand how our brains produce rationality nor do our AI scientists understand what algorithms their neural nets are implementing post-training. Therefore, any specific claim the theologians make runs the risk of immediately getting invalidated by some scientific discovery on either side (theologians these days are generally smart enough to avoid putting themselves in that position.)

Interesting stuff. "Soul" is hard to define. A thought experiment I do is this: Does a human have a soul? Sure. A rock? No. What about a single-cell organism? Nah. An insect? No. But what about a mouse? There is a kind of gradient forming, and it's very hard to say where the soul begins and where it ends. It's a very unweildy word.

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