Podcast Episode 005: Artificial Intelligence; Hell; Aliens & Salvation

25 thoughts on “Podcast Episode 005: Artificial Intelligence; Hell; Aliens & Salvation”

1. Darn! I was seriously going to ask substantially the same question about Artificial Intelligence, but someone got there first. >:-O
   😉
   On a more serious note, I assume your statement that a biological organism without intelligence should not be given rights should be interpreted in terms of either having actual intelligence or potentially having intelligence if given time to naturally develop or if a disorder did not interfere with what would otherwise be such a potential (for example a human embryo or a severely mentally disabled person).

2. Let me take a crack at it before listening to the podcast.
   Q: If A.I. were ever achieved at a level which would be close to or equal to human intelligence how would we approach it?
   A: Like any other computer.
   Q: Would it be morally right to create A.I. if we were capable of it?
   A: It would be morally neutral.
   Q: If this A.I. were able to be fully sentient, would it deserved to be given rights, such as in Asimov’s novels?
   A: Absolutely not.
   Q: Would God give it a soul?
   A: Give what a soul? Computer software? Pfft.
   Q: How can an finite number of years of sinning result in an infinite amount of punishment?
   A: It isn’t a person’s sins that get him into heaven, it is his sinfulness state of being.
   Q: Do (or could) aliens have souls?
   A: Unknowable.
   Q: Could some have them and not others?
   A: Yes, it is logically possible.
   Q: How could we tell?
   A: We couldn’t.
   Q: Could it be possible that aliens are a race unaffected by the Fall and thus don’t need salvation?
   A: No, creation is fallen.
   Q: Was Christ’s sacrifice for the benefit of humans alone?
   A: No, Christ redeemed creation.
   Q: Would the discovery of alien races mean that Adam and Eve probably didn’t live on Earth and probably lived waaaay before we thought?
   A: I don’t understand the premise of the question, but it sounds like a non sequitur.
   Q: Could Adam and Eve be descended from another race?
   A: No

3. Jay D: I’m the guy who asked the third question.
   After looking at it again, you and Jimmy are right on question 4. It in no way follows that the origins of the human race would necessarily have a different origin if aliens existed. In hindsight, question 4 makes very little sense at all.

4. I’d like to subscribe to your podcast, but neither Doggcatcher nor Google Listen recognize it as a valid audio feed.

5. There aren’t any aliens out there. Belief in aliens is primarily evolution-driven propaganda and the insane idea that life can spontaneously arise out from anywhere.
   The universe was made by God for man as part of creation. Man’s rebellion through Adam brought death to the entire universe.
   Aliens in sci-fi are fun plot devices on par with wizards, elves and hobgoblins and nothing more.
   Scripture states nothing about them, but it’s implicitly clear that Earth alone is the only planet that bears life and that through Adam the curse of death and decay befell the entire universe. The existence of intelligent life elsewhere on par with man would have serious ramifications on the Gospel message and the entirety of Biblical salvation. If one wishes to posit that there’s some other hypothetical plane of reality existing elsewhere in another dimensions that God possibly has, then it has no bearing on us whatsoever and is not worth bothering with other than simply to imagine so. What we do has no bearing on them, and neither do they affect us.

6. On the topic of A.I., they are exactly that… A.I. Artificial…
   I don’t believe humanity will ever be able to create a simulation that can fully have every depth and facet that man is given. Mankind itself fails to appreciate what it is and doesn’t understand itself as well as it thinks it does. We’re nowhere close.
   A.I. is built using finite and physical materials. Man can never make an infinite material. Thus it cannot create anything like the immortal soul, which doesn’t exist in physical reality to begin with and which no science can ever infringe upon.
   God would never bother to give a bunch of code or scrap metal a soul as these aren’t bodies and not created through the manner in which He ordained life to begin. It is only through biological means that God will conceive new souls through human sexual intercourse.

7. As for hell… God allows souls to go to hell because hell is what those souls desire. In fact, they would outright hate heaven because it has none of the things they ever desired because they pursued carnal things and rejected joy. The same fire of love that warms and pleases the souls in heaven, and refines the souls in purgatory, is a torment for those lost souls. You might see it as that heaven is actually hell to them.
   Finite sins are only possible in the dimension of time in our physical reality. But when we die we pass from the world of time into the dimension of eternity in which time does not exist and only the infinite. Depending on your state of being, your hearts desire was either turned to God in which case you gain God’s presence and heaven… or to expiate your sins you will transition into heaven slowly through the place of purgatory, or await the day of your redemption from limbo… or in the case of the vast majority of souls, they never wanted God, only carnal pleasures they believed were everything to them, and they shall have them in abundance in eternity, but… devoid of the feelings of joy they actually sought that only exist from God.
   So their desires and wants will be devoid of the feeling of joy that only God provides and will for them become suffering in perpetuity because their desires are useless apart from joy and pleasure, for those same finite wants and desires they had on earth, devoid of the joy they obtained from them, are now multiplied into infinity in their uselessness and will torture them forever causing them perpetual despair, their hatred multiplied will burn them like a fire and consume them. Their source and their hell is bourne from their own heart’s desires.
   Those in heaven cast aside their wants and desires for the things of the world by recognizing that the joy they obtained from these things was from God all along. They knew the true source of it and desired God in their hearts, and thus their heart’s desiring is magnified in the realm of eternity forever as they gain God and thus by desiring only God shall possess all joys and all pleasures in abundance forever and exponentially. The fire that consumes them is the burning warmth of love.

8. It is only through biological means that God will conceive new souls through human sexual intercourse.
   surely this is going too far, unless you want to deny souls to individuals conceived in vitro or (I expect they’ll ineveitably be among us) to a human clone.
   On a somewhat related tangent: I have sometimes entertained writing a sci-fi horror story where we would successfully create an AI and, like in a lot of scifi, the AI would turn hostile but it would be precisely because the machine had become ensoulled, through deomonic possession. A machine seems like the perfect host for the deomon and proves resistant to exorcism and the only way to save the world from it is by destroying the machine. But I don’t really have enough gumption to develop the story and it anyway seems too derivative of that possessed, decapitated head in C.S. Lewis’ ‘That Hideous Strength’ so probably I’ll never actually write it.

9. Another one-line plot summary idea to go along with Adam’s:
   Aliens descend upon the earth in search of the ultimate truth, interview all spiritual leaders, and then convert to Catholicism. Wouldn’t that drive the atheists crazy?

10. If one wishes to posit that there’s some other hypothetical plane of reality existing elsewhere in another dimensions that God possibly has, then it has no bearing on us whatsoever and is not worth bothering with other than simply to imagine so.
    Actually, it would have profound implications. I have thought about sending in a question to Jimmy about this, but it is an extremely difficult question, on a par with the second ontological argument of St. Anslem. If this is the best of all possible worlds, but other possible worlds exist, arguendo, from the quantum Many Worlds hypothesis, simultaneous with ours, then either they must judge their world as the best of all possible worlds, since God made it, which would contradict Divine Simplicity, since God can only make one best possible world, or if it is not the best of all possible worlds, then their realizing that fact would imply that their existence is merely serving a secondary good (supporting our best world) and their existence is contingent on ours. This would set up an order of possible worlds, but in such a way that lesser worlds could not know their position in the order. Answers to their prayers would be contingent on how it affects the best possible world’s good or, depending upon their position in the hierarchy, all of the worlds above them in perfection. While this does not affect Divine Simplicity, per se, since the lower possible worlds could not know how their existence affects higher possible worlds this leads to the following problem: without access to the ordering of world, no single world can know that it is the best world. Given this, there is no way to know that this is the best of all possible worlds, only that it is a part of the best of all possible worlds system.
    So, yes, the question has many implications.
    The Chicken

11. For anyone interested, there’s a competition called the Loebner Prize for chat bots that is set up somewhat like the Turing test. You can check out the state of the art by looking through the transcripts of the competitions here: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html .
    However, most serious AI research isn’t concerned at all with the Turing test anymore. Fooling human beings isn’t that useful, and so we’re more concerned about coming up with better ways to solve hard problems algorithmically. Turing test bots rely entirely too much on trickery than actual simulation of human thinking, and in either case, it is of little utility outside of that application. Rather, modern AI is judged more by an ideal rationality rather than how “human” a machine can act. Sometimes, the algorithms are informed by biological processes (e.g. neural nets), but that’s only one tool in the box.

12. Bryce Lalibert has written a few good blog posts on the topic of AI:
    http://amtheomusings.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/what-is-reason-or-can-computers-reason/
    And
    http://amtheomusings.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/meaning-and-brain-states/
    I really like his blog as well. Thanks for the thought provoking pod show. There are A LOT of catholic philosophers and thinkers weighing in on the topic of AI and what it means to be human in general. I think some semblence of “human” AI may occur, that it will ever acheive a full simulation of a human being where you could never know that the person you are touching, talking to and spending time with is a human or AI – no, I do not think they will achieve such a state. The unique mind of a human cant simply be replicated by material means and the programming of that would be an astoundingly immense, IMMENSE task, on the level of what the brain does: which does not relate well to computational terms. We know so little about the brain as is. Anyway, a lot could be expounded upon in this area, it touches upon the philosophy of mind to a great deal. The uses or potential abuses of AI are what the makers intend for them to do. I fail to see how free will can be programmed into a machine, but that is just one problematic issue for creating a human like AI. The more rules you put into software the more complicated things become. Arguably, the AI would be little more than the rules we have given or programmed into its software to govern its “behavior.”

13. The argument against a soul for AI is rather simple: one can only create in the genus one inhabits. The soul is immaterial. Material beings cannot give rise to immateriality. God, being immaterial, can. Material beings do not give rise to souls, thus, they cannot give rise to personhood and thus, they cannot make a sentient or human AI.
    Data is a toaster.
    The Chicken

14. Chris R., I liked your post. Two points I especially appreciated were:
    “I fail to see how free will can be programmed into a machine”. Can you imagine the Terminator saying, “I have been programmed to have free will.” Of course that’s an oxymoron.
    The other point you made was that the human mind is unique. My personal experience has been that every single human mind is unique. For example, you can have very smart people like the Chicken and Jimmy Akin, and then you can have very not-so-smart and not-very-nice people as well.

15. Where do these principles come from, The Chicken? And do they really bear much weight? Certainly an angel can’t create souls even though it inhabits the genus of immateriality. You might press the idea further and say that fundamentally nobody creates anything at all, material or immaterial, except God. We just manipulate what is provided by Him.
    I think you can probably form a stronger argument against a soul in an AI.

16. not to say I disagree that computer AI will be soulless (I agree with that) but I think making a strong proof of that point is harder than you assert and I don’t really understand the connection between your assertions or really accept the principle of begetting within one’s genus or see it being a useful starting point even if it can itself be demonstrated.

17. Where do these principles come from, The Chicken?
    Straight out of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquina, who borrowed them from Aristotle. A good book I recommend is, The Last Superstition, by Dr. Ed Feser, who goes into the four classical forms and material and immateriality theory.
    Notice, I did not say that God could not give a robot a soul (a point that Alan Turing made, so I hear), but rather than man cannot imbue a robot with a soul.
    The Chicken

18. Ah yes, humans born through in vitro will be granted a soul as they are conceived in more or less the same manner as sexual intercourse. I didn’t mean to exclude them…
    Rather my point is that God created distinct sexes, man and woman and sexual intercourse to be meaningful representations of His divine mystery and who God is. By distorting the natural order of things we distort our image of God and a distorted image of God is really what leads to people rejecting Him out of ignorance of who He really is. They in fashioning their own sexuality and morality, unwittingly fashion a god or idol according to their own sinfulness and error, and thus not knowing the true God endanger their salvation by desiring something that is nothing at all like God, or rather just carnal pleasures in search of joy that in reality is only from God whom they reject. Thus they are actively seeking a state devoid of joy which is hell imagining that these carnal wants and desries are the source of joy, when in reality they are just catalysts and reflections of joy whose source is in God alone.
    In understanding proper sexual dinstinctions of men and women and proper sexual intercourse, we come closer to knowing who God is and what God is like and thus form a more intimate relationship with Him. This is why the most attacked and abused thing in this world is sex, the family and gender. It must be distorted in order to give people a false impression of God and thus unwittingly reject Him and in doing so reject heaven of their own free will.

19. On the topic of multiple universes, that’s a good point the Chicken. Those implications are problematic. Truthfully I don’t believe there is another world out there, it never sat well with me in the grand scheme of things.
    Rather if God was going to create, He would’ve gotten it right the first time. There would be no need to create again as something else which would be problematic in understanding God’s nature.
    I only suppose in some senses that some other ‘dimensions’ exist within one plane of reality, such as that of Time and that of Eternity where there is Heaven and Hell. And it’s even said that there are different spheres or levels to both Heaven, Purgatory, limbo of the infants, limbo of the fathers, and Hell. Scripture even makes reference to the ‘third heaven’ so it seems that the ‘heavens’ that God created, specified in plaural, refer to 3 areas:
    The first Heaven – Space itself with the galaxies and stars
    The second Heaven – The realm of the angelic beings
    The third Heaven – Or the ‘Heaven of Heavens,’ the Beatific vision of God where He resides in full glory.

20. For those who want proof that material objects can not give rise to am immaterial soul, here is St. Thomas’s take (Summa I Q 65 art. 4):
    Article 4. Whether the forms of bodies are from the angels?
    I answer that, It was the opinion of some that all corporeal forms are derived from spiritual substances, which we call the angels. And there are two ways in which this has been stated. For Plato held that the forms of corporeal matter are derived from, and formed by, forms immaterially subsisting, by a kind of participation. Thus he held that there exists an immaterial man, and an immaterial horse, and so forth, and that from such the individual sensible things that we see are constituted, in so far as in corporeal matter there abides the impression received from these separate forms, by a kind of assimilation, or as he calls it, “participation” (Phaedo xlix). And, according to the Platonists, the order of forms corresponds to the order of those separate substances; for example, that there is a single separate substance, which is horse and the cause of all horses, whilst above this is separate life, or “per se” life, as they term it, which is the cause of all life, and that above this again is that which they call being itself, which is the cause of all being. Avicenna, however, and certain others, have maintained that the forms of corporeal things do not subsist “per se” in matter, but in the intellect only. Thus they say that from forms existing in the intellect of spiritual creatures (called “intelligences” by them, but “angels” by us) proceed all the forms of corporeal matter, as the form of his handiwork proceeds from the forms in the mind of the craftsman. This theory seems to be the same as that of certain heretics of modern times, who say that God indeed created all things, but that the devil formed corporeal matter, and differentiated it into species.
    But all these opinions seem to have a common origin; they all, in fact, sought for a cause of forms as though the form were of itself brought into being. Whereas, as Aristotle (Metaph. vii, text. 26,27,28), proves, what is, properly speaking, made, is the “composite.” Now, such are the forms of corruptible things that at one time they exist and at another exist not, without being themselves generated or corrupted, but by reason of the generation or corruption of the “composite”; since even forms have not being, but composites have being through forms: for, according to a thing’s mode of being, is the mode in which it is brought into being. Since, then, like is produced from like, we must not look for the cause of corporeal forms in any immaterial form, but in something that is composite, as this fire is generated by that fire. Corporeal forms, therefore, are caused, not as emanations from some immaterial form, but by matter being brought from potentiality into act by some composite agent. But since the composite agent, which is a body, is moved by a created spiritual substance, as Augustine says (De Trin. iii, 4,5), it follows further that even corporeal forms are derived from spiritual substances, not emanating from them, but as the term of their movement. And, further still, the species of the angelic intellect, which are, as it were, the seminal types of corporeal forms, must be referred to God as the first cause. But in the first production of corporeal creatures no transmutation from potentiality to act can have taken place, and accordingly, the corporeal forms that bodies had when first produced came immediately form God, whose bidding alone matter obeys, as its own proper cause. To signify this, Moses prefaces each work with the words, “God said, Let this thing be,” or “that,” to denote the formation of all things by the Word of God, from Whom, according to Augustine [Tract. i. in Joan. and Gen. ad lit. i. 4, is “all form and fitness and concord of parts.”

21. While we’re talking about ensouled manufactures, what about the chimeras and cybrids and hybrids the English scientists did so covertly? Would this be a good podcast question?
    http://prodigalnomore.wordpress.com

22. I asked a question about those on Catholic Answers, Live, last June. Jimmy gave an extensive answer. Yes, it is probably good to revisit it.

23. Among his answers to the questions, Jay D hit upon what I think is the most interesting aspect of this whole discussion: the nature of the Fall. Not that other aspects of the discussion aren’t interesting, but I think that everything else has a standard, satisfactory answer for each real possibility.
    From Jay D’s post:
    
    Q: Could it be possible that aliens are a race unaffected by the Fall and thus don’t need salvation?
    A: No, creation is fallen.
    Q: Was Christ’s sacrifice for the benefit of humans alone?
    A: No, Christ redeemed creation.
    
    First of all, Jay D seems to disagree with Jimmy Akin on this point. In the podcast, as in previous blog posts on this subject, Akin puts forth the real possibility that the universe before the Fall is just as it is now, but the first persons had some physical aspect of preternatural grace removed from them in the Fall. In the podcast, Akin’s treatment of this comes in the his discussion of the possibility that we might encounter aliens that did not experience the Fall.
    While this view, that the Fall happened to us but not to nature, might be permitted by the Church, it seems very unlikely to me. Consider that in Genesis the appearance of thorns—a change in nature—is depicted as a result of the Fall. Also, Aquinas, I seem to recall, considered the suffering of animals to be a real evil, and God is not the author of evil; so in that view, the suffering of animals results from the Fall. I could go on with reasons why the universe seems to be broken.
    But if we entertain the idea that nature fell along with man, then we have a very interesting—and, in my view, vastly under-appreciated—problem. The observational record to which scientists must conform their theories seems to stretch very far back in time. And not just the fossil record. The light from the cosmic microwave background, for example, appears from the Earth’s point of view to emanate from a distant surface that shone about 14 billion years ago. In all of the observations that we have, some of which seem to stretch back near to the beginning of time, there is no evidence that the fundamental rules by which the universe operates have ever changed. That is, a single physical theoretical framework explains all of these observations. But according to the rules that seem permanently and deeply stamped into nature, every living body must die.
    Because the Catholic position is that the death of the human body is a consequence of the Fall, it would seem, on the fallen-nature view, that with respect to time as we perceive it, the universe has always been in a fallen state. The Fall would seem to be eternal, at least in some sense.
    On this view of the always-broken universe, we need somehow to understand how the first human persons in history are responsible for the brokenness of the entire universe. How they appear late in the history of a broken universe, and somehow they acted to change even the past. Or perhaps time itself is an aspect of the brokenness of the universe and a result of the Fall.
    This is a deep problem, but it is a problem that we must face if we wish to engage the possibilities inherent in modern scientific theory and if we wish to entertain also the possibility that preternatural grace did not involve temporary magic force fields that protected the first persons until they sinned.

24. he signed with: “Klathu Barada Nicto”?
    He must have watched War of the Worlds 😛

25. Actually, it’s The Day the Earth Stood Still.
    I’ll have to tell y’all my high school art class “Gort-mode” story sometime. 🙂

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