Soulless drones - the fix for Christian soteriology

[cloudyday2]

You're just attributing concepts that we use for the mind to the brain instead. We are not thinking--our brains are thinking, but they cannot do so without this unaccounted for conjuring trick called consciousness. Are we aware, or is it our brains that are aware? I don't see how awareness can be explained away, so I don't think you solve any of the conundrums of consciousness simply by treating it like some sort of elaborate hologram.

The mind like consciousness is malarky IMO. Maybe there is a universal God-mind and God-consciousness, but humans don't have minds or consciousnesses. We compute and the mechanics of our computations might have some sensitivity to the randomness of particles in our brains (or maybe the brain has evolved to almost entirely filter-out that randomness).

Probably @Quid est Veritas? has opinions from a medical and psychological perspective, but here are some of my random thoughts. (BTW, I'm glad to hear criticism of the "emergent property" idea. I have heard this idea so often from so many seemingly intelligent people, but it has always seemed like a bamboozle to me LOL)

Software has algorithms with abstractions that model the problem. Evolution can create software without the need for a programmer. There is an abstraction of a "rational actor" that is applied to empathy and communication with other people, our sense of self/consciousness, our tendency to anthropomorphize pets, our belief in gods, etc. This abstraction of a "rational actor" must be connected to childhood development. Another data point is psychosis where the sense of self often becomes confused and people perceive their bodies dissolving into their surroundings or find themselves arguing with their own noses and so forth.

Probably the brain has some proto-abstractions and proto-algorithms hard-wired by evolution that a developing child's brain assembles randomly in various ways until it inevitably stumbles upon the useful algorithms and abstractions common to humans. Consciousness is just one of these useful abstractions.

That's my best attempt to think about it.

EDIT: Here is one more thought. To "understand" something is to be able to simulate something in our brains. A brain can "understand/simulate" a thing as an aggregate of simple physical parts if that thing is very simple. The brain obviously cannot "understand" itself without creating abstractions to simplify the problem. Consciousness is just an abstraction that works well when a brain seeks to "understand" its own behavior. Consciousness isn't a perfect abstraction. Psychology usually needs to use more complicated abstractions.

 

[cloudyday2]

This would be the position of AI as well. There is a reason people espouse the Turing test, as that is the only way we would be able to affirm 'consciousness'.

The Turing test is that a black box with behavior similar to a human has human intelligence. I think there is a difference between intelligence and consciousness. Consciousness is a belief about self. We must go inside the black box to know consciousness. We might be able to attach a debugger to a software process to examine the data structures and thereby confirm if that software believes itself to have consciousness. Or if we understand the program sufficiently we might be able to guess from external behavior that it must be utilizing an abstraction of consciousness inside the black box.

It does throw up as many problems as it solves, such as if the soulless would be my "neighbour", be moral agents, or be anything more than animals. It directly contradicts centuries of moral teaching and could easily be manipulated into an Us vs Them mentality, that would allow us to be very clever Devils and excuse quite a lot of egregious acts.

There isn't a problem as long as we are incapable of distinguishing the people who have souls from the people who do not have souls. A way to distinguish in the future might be if a computer can simulate a person's decisions and prove that person has no freewill. Such a person could then justifiably be treated as an inferior being.

Another interesting thought. Christians often wonder if they have truly been "born again" or wonder this about fellow Christians. If a computer can determine if freewill exists, then we would have a way to know which Christians have truly been "born again" LOL

 

[hedrick]

If software is programmed to function similarly to the human brain then it will also develop the delusion of being conscious IMO. The key is that the software must be incapable of predicting its own behavior. This leads to the software's rationalization that there is a consciousness with freewill and so forth.

I think it might be possible someday for a computer to simulate a human with enough precision to predict every "decision" made by that human and therefore demonstrate that humans are strictly material automatons.

In an early paper (like 1960s) Marvin Minsky maintained that an advanced AI would believe (falsely, in his opinion) that it had an immaterial soul. I'm afraid I don't have a reference for that paper, but this web page points to more recent writing that sounds similar: Brains, Minds, AI, God: Marvin Minsky Thought Like No One Else (Tribute).

I don't see how you can call consciousness a delusion. It's a term we use to refer to certain aspects of human experience. That's not to say that certain concepts of it might not be wrong. That it's associated with a supernatural component of human nature could be false, but not the existence of consciousness. The only reason it would be impossible for an AI to be conscious is if the phenomenon is inextricably connected with the existence of something supernatural. However the obvious belief for you would be that it's not. In that case, there would be no reason why an AI couldn't be conscious.

There is actually no official definition of where souls come from. There are two major theories: that it comes from the parents somehow, or that it's created by God for each new child. If creationism (different use of the term than YEC) is true, God could probably create souls for AIs. It's not obvious how the soul would influence the operation of the computer, but there's no reason in principle that God couldn't arrange something. The same issue exists with us. He has to arrange some way for the soul to influence the body. There's no agreement on what this is, nor as far as I know is there any well-established suggestion, since people generally haven't accepted the suggestion that it's via the pineal gland.

But would God create souls for AIs? I think most Christians would say no. While many in CF have suggested that pets can show up in heaven, this is at least non-traditional if not heretical, since Christian tradition has generally maintained that among entities on earth, only humans have eternal souls (there is some concept of an animal soul, but it's not the same kind of thing as ours), and that it's these souls that provide the continuity of the person between this life and the next. (Of course Isaiah refers to animals in the Kingdom. The traditionalist answer I've seen on that is that God can create wolves and lions for the new earth, but that since they don't have eternal souls, our pets can't make the transition from earth to new earth. It's not so clear that most CF contributors agree with this. If animals don't have souls, then their equivalent of personality is entirely in the physical brain. In that case God could create resurrection bodies for them, and they would still be themselves, without the need for soul. But I don't believe this is strictly orthodox. I've seen it referred to as the Fidoist heresy.) However Christian tradition has also maintained that there are immaterial entities such as angels. An AI is a new type of entity, so it's not clear that there's any tradition covering it. But I'm pretty sure most Christians would think the suggestion absurd.

 

[Petros2015]

@Chesterton, I wanted to mention a possible problem with your idea in post #6. If my belief causes something to happen and your disbelief prevents this something from happening, then in some cases we can no longer share the same universe.

What happens when you are in a boat and there are 100 oars all rowing in different directions? Consistency. The boat really doesn't go anywhere significant, it is maybe carried on by the current of time a little. When you dream though, there's only 1 oar in the water. The boat can go anywhere.

In some sense though, we are in different universes. There's one world where a man (some would say a good man or a spiritual teacher) named gets nailed to a cross and stays dead. If you are not a believer, that's the world you live in. That's what happened, end of story. That is AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WORLD from one where 3 days later that man resurrects. Those are two different worlds.

The Resurrection is an invitation to another world.

 

[cloudyday2]

In an early paper (like 1960s) Marvin Minsky maintained that an advanced AI would believe (falsely, in his opinion) that it had an immaterial soul. I'm afraid I don't have a reference for that paper, but this web page points to more recent writing that sounds similar: Brains, Minds, AI, God: Marvin Minsky Thought Like No One Else (Tribute).

I don't see how you can call consciousness a delusion. It's a term we use to refer to certain aspects of human experience. That's not to say that certain concepts of it might not be wrong. That it's associated with a supernatural component of human nature could be false, but not the existence of consciousness. The only reason it would be impossible for an AI to be conscious is if the phenomenon is inextricably connected with the existence of something supernatural. However the obvious belief for you would be that it's not. In that case, there would be no reason why an AI couldn't be conscious.

I think our only difference is in the definition of consciousness. I don't think consciousness is "real" unless it is transcendent, makes non-deterministic choices, etc. I agree that there is no reason a computer could not believe that it a supernatural soul/consciousness. Such a computer might feel justified in killing its human operator rather than face death in a system reset or might even become a born again Christian after hearing the gospel from a human LOL

There is actually no official definition of where souls come from. There are two major theories: that it comes from the parents somehow, or that it's created by God for each new child. If creationism (different use of the term than YEC) is true, God could probably create souls for AIs. It's not obvious how the soul would influence the operation of the computer, but there's no reason in principle that God couldn't arrange something. The same issue exists with us. He has to arrange some way for the soul to influence the body. There's no agreement on what this is, nor as far as I know is there any well-established suggestion, since people generally haven't accepted the suggestion that it's via the pineal gland.

The soul issue is also important in the debate on birth control and abortion. Maybe in parallel with the physical union of sperm and egg at conception there is a sacred spiritual union of two souls that creates a child soul? Maybe use of birth control results in the creation of a child soul without the physical body that it needs? Maybe the child produced in a rape is soulless because the love was absent? (I don't believe any of that of course - just imagining possibilities.)

EDIT: This is why I like to imagine the soul is created in "the elect" to allow them to become "born again". Everybody else is a "slave to sin" (i.e. lacking freewill).

 

[hedrick]

The soul issue is also important in the debate on birth control and abortion. Maybe in parallel with the physical union of sperm and egg at conception there is a sacred spiritual union of two souls that creates a child soul? Maybe use of birth control results in the creation of a child soul without the physical body that it needs? Maybe the child produced in a rape is soulless because the love was absent? (I don't believe any of that of course - just imagining possibilities.)

This is a type of traducianism, which has been referred to as generationism.

The early 20th Cent Catholic Encyclopedia says that creationism is the expected Catholic position, although generationism hasn't been formally condemned. CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Traducianism.

I think ideas may have changed as a result of the abortion debate, but that's an issue I'd prefer to avoid in this thread.

 

[cloudyday2]

To address the worry of @Quid est Veritas? that this belief might encourage born-again Christians to mistreat the soulless drone humans (such as myself), there is a possibility that the seed sown by God through the gospel may lay dormant in the soil of the human host before sprouting into a born-again Christian. So although the born-again Christians might be tempted to convert me into Soylent Green there would be the risk of destroying a potential born-again Christian in the process. This is similar to the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares.

 

[cloudyday2]

O.k. I think I can explain why I gag whenever I hear the "emergent property" hypothesis of consciousness. It doesn't answer questions like "are we automatons?". A completely deterministic automaton can have consciousness when it is defined as an "emergent property". "What are we?" That is the question that consciousness should address, but "emergent property" dodges that question.

 

[Silmarien]

I think our only difference is in the definition of consciousness. I don't think consciousness is "real" unless it is transcendent, makes non-deterministic choices, etc.

Are you conflating consciousness with free will?

People who actually reject consciousness will tell you that language has no meaning, that beliefs and thoughts have no real content, that our entire mental life simply doesn't exist. These words you're reading now? Completely meaningless. You only think you understand them, but that's an illusion too.

It's kind of like replying to "Why is there something instead of nothing?" with "There is nothing. You only think there's something, but the fact of the matter is that there is nothing. Nothing exists. Problem solved."

You seem to be taking an all-or-nothing Cartesian approach, though. If our thoughts aren't fully transparent to us, if we do not have full control over ourselves, then there is no such thing as mind. I really don't think that's how anyone conceives of mental properties anymore, though.

The only reason it would be impossible for an AI to be conscious is if the phenomenon is inextricably connected with the existence of something supernatural.

Or if it's linked to something biological. There are naturalists like John Searle who are really serious critics of AI partly for that reason. Also because he really hates computationalism.

 

[Chesterton]

You might be right, because my knowledge of QM is limited. I'm not sure I agree though. Spiritual people are always claiming QM supports their ideas. If it was so clear-cut, then the physicists who understand QM would be more spiritual. Some physicists are spiritual, but many are atheists. Also many atheists claim to be "spiritual" when they practice meditation or study Buddhism, so that makes the issue murky.

It doesn't follow that more physicists would be more spiritual. We all have to think for ourselves and decide for ourselves. We are agents which can choose. If evidence itself determined belief, O. J. Simpson would have been convicted of murders.

@Chesterton, I wanted to mention a possible problem with your idea in post #6. If my belief causes something to happen and your disbelief prevents this something from happening, then in some cases we can no longer share the same universe.

You could be right. Our minds could be generating different universes, and different eternities.

 

[cloudyday2]

It doesn't follow that more physicists would be more spiritual. We all have to think for ourselves and decide for ourselves. We are agents which can choose. If evidence itself determined belief, O. J. Simpson would have been convicted of murders.

O.k. here's an analogy. Take the theory that use of fossil fuels is warming Earth's climate. Examine a representative sample of climate experts. Look at their political leanings and so forth to predict how we might expect them to view climate change if they were non-experts. Also control for the fact that some climate experts have benefited economically from the belief in climate change. Then look at their actual views against the predicted views. If the actual views are more in favor than would be predicted, then I would say that expertise in climatology makes a person more likely to believe in climate change.

So it seems that the same could be done with physicists who deeply understand QM. See if they are more likely to believe in spirits, magic, and so on than we would otherwise expect given their personal traits.

IDK, I think it would be a way to determine if the woo-people truly have evidence in QM.

 

[cloudyday2]

Are you conflating consciousness with free will?

Consciousness makes not sense without specifying what we are conscious of. For example there are notions of "Christ consciousness" and the supposedly higher forms of consciousness that occur during meditation. The typical form of consciousness that we talk about is belief that we exist as a rational actor with freewill and control of our physical body.

So if we can prove that freewill does not exist, then we have proven that this basic form of consciousness is a delusion.

Strictly speaking consciousness does exist, but the belief that we are conscious of may be true or false. I suspect it is false and therefore a delusion.

That's what I think. The philosophical theories you mentioned, I'm not certain if I agree or disagree. But hopefully what I wrote above clarifies.

 

[Silmarien]

Consciousness makes not sense without specifying what we are conscious of. For example there are notions of "Christ consciousness" and the supposedly higher forms of consciousness that occur during meditation. The typical form of consciousness that we talk about is belief that we exist as a rational actor with freewill and control of our physical body.

No, that has nothing to do with consciousness. I would suggest taking a look at something like David Chalmer's The Conscious Mind for a breakdown on the problems involved. There are various different aspects of the mind--there are psychological factors that control behavior, many of which are subconscious. There's also phenomenology, or conscious experience of the world. When I discuss consciousness, I'm generally talking about this aspect: what is it like to be a being within the world?

This has very little to do with whether we have conscious control over our bodies, which is actually only one aspect of the free will question to begin with. I would say that conscious bodily control is fairly limited, but this doesn't make me a determinist.

So if we can prove that freewill does not exist, then we have proven that this basic form of consciousness is a delusion.

Free will is a much trickier issue than consciousness, it's true. I'm not sure how we could ever prove that it doesn't exist, though. One of the more interesting approaches out there is the Two-Stage Model.

Strictly speaking consciousness does exist, but the belief that we are conscious of may be true or false. I suspect it is false and therefore a delusion.

Then it's free will that you believe is illusory, not consciousness. That's a very different position.

So it seems that the same could be done with physicists who deeply understand QM. See if they are more likely to believe in spirits, magic, and so on than we would otherwise expect given their personal traits.

IDK, I think it would be a way to determine if the woo-people truly have evidence in QM.

I don't see what spirits, magic, and "woo" have to do with quantum mechanics. I would imagine that most theistic physicists are not the superstitious type. (It's the non-naturalistic neuroscientists you sometimes have to watch out for.)

 

[hedrick]

O.k. I think I can explain why I gag whenever I hear the "emergent property" hypothesis of consciousness. It doesn't answer questions like "are we automatons?". A completely deterministic automaton can have consciousness when it is defined as an "emergent property". "What are we?" That is the question that consciousness should address, but "emergent property" dodges that question.

How does it dodge the question? The idea that consciousness is an emergent property probably wouldn't arise except in a physicalist model. So it seems to me that calling consciousness emergent pretty much implies determinism, give or take quantum effects.

But I'm not sure that determinism is very useful in this context. Let's assume physicalism is true (something I'm not actually asserting, please note). First, the brain isn't built from logic gates. The logic elements are messier, and their switching is subject to a bit of randomness. Second, it's possible that there is at least some room for quantum randomness. Third, the environment we live in, though in principle probably deterministic, is for all practical purposes a significant random influence. Once a system is complex enough, and in a complex enough environment enough that something like chaos theory becomes significant, I'm not convinced that it is distinguishable from true randomness in any real way. The point of talking about emergent properties is that determinism isn't really very useful in describing it, even if in principle it's true.

Even our current AI systems (which are no where near consciousness, as far a I know) are reaching the point where they're deterministic only in principle. It's not that you can't understand roughly where they're going to go, but the specific details of how a neural net ends up after training aren't deterministic in any realistic sense. One of DARPA's current research priorities is to develop ways of describing why a neural net made the decisions it did. It's a useful goal, but it's not clear whether it's possible. (That's actually an ethical problem. I'm concerned that expert systems based on neural nets are likely to end up with the same kind of prejudices that humans have, for the same reasons. But because they're not sticking a layer of deductive reasoning and ethics on top of their "gut feelings," it's going to be hard to avoid prejudice.)

I also note that even invoking dualism (i.e. a supernatural soul) doesn't necessarily solve this problem. Is there something like physics in the supernatural realm? I'd assume so. There is certainly plenty of weirdness among people, but not the kind that suggests a completely lawless system. The soul could end up an emergent property of a supernatural system.

 

[cloudyday2]

I don't see what spirits, magic, and "woo" have to do with quantum mechanics. I would imagine that most theistic physicists are not the superstitious type. (It's the non-naturalistic neuroscientists you sometimes have to watch out for.)

QM has a lot of weird features (as everybody knows), but the interesting feature for me is the probability waves. Potentially randomness might be the universe's pineal gland or something. (@hedrick referred earlier to ancient belief that the pineal gland was the interface between the soul and the body.)

 

[hedrick]

QM has a lot of weird features (as everybody knows), but the interesting feature for me is the probability waves. Potentially randomness might be the universe's pineal gland or something. (@hedrick referred earlier to ancient belief that the pineal gland was the interface between the soul and the body.)

Decartes. Not sure that's ancient. Here's an article on it: Descartes and the Pineal Gland (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). From that article it's not so clear how accurate the usual summary is.

 

[cloudyday2]

I also note that even invoking dualism (i.e. a supernatural soul) doesn't necessarily solve this problem. Is there something like physics in the supernatural realm? I'd assume so. There is certainly plenty of weirdness among people, but not the kind that suggests a completely lawless system. The soul could end up an emergent property of a supernatural system.

Maybe the solution is that QM randomness is real indeterminism as opposed to a result of hidden determinism behind a supernatural veil? One definition of entropy I have seen is the length of a string of bits whose state is indeterminate. To me that hints that randomness is a real physical thing. IDK

I suppose the measure of freewill would be to have a set of equally desirable options. Can a super-smart computer determine which option you will choose? If it can, then freewill doesn't exist. If the randomness in QM is real and the design of the brain does not filter-out this randomness, then we must have some real randomness and we could call that freewill.

 

[hedrick]

I suppose the measure of freewill would be to have a set of equally desirable options. Can a super-smart computer determine which option you will choose? If it can, then freewill doesn't exist. If the randomness in QM is real and the design of the brain does not filter-out this randomness, then we must have some real randomness and we could call that freewill.

I don't think free will is the result of randomness. Rational people act in support of their goals, in accordance with their character. As long as no one is pointing a gun at them, we consider them free. We call people who behave randomly insane. Of course at times it's fun to have controlled amounts of randomness in our lives, and it may enhance our creativity. But I don't think it's essential for that to be "real" randomness as opposed to things that depend so complexly upon the situation that it's not obvious what is going to happen.

 

[Silmarien]

QM has a lot of weird features (as everybody knows), but the interesting feature for me is the probability waves. Potentially randomness might be the universe's pineal gland or something. (@hedrick referred earlier to ancient belief that the pineal gland was the interface between the soul and the body.)

But I don't think that's spirits, magic, or "woo." (Of course, I'm not sure precisely what "woo" is, except for whatever our friends the dogmatic skeptics have decided to ridicule in their infinite wisdom and even more infinite tolerance for other views.)

The probability stuff is pretty neat, though, yes. I think it's only weird from a Newtonian perspective, though. Before that, people pretty much assumed potentiality was an inherent part of reality. Because Aquinas said so. Because Aristotle said so. And maybe they were right! I've tossed this article around a couple times: Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities

 

[Ygrene Imref]

One unappealing feature of Christianity is the belief that only a few will be saved ("the elect") and everybody else will be lost ("the world"). Universalism attempts to fix this problem, but there are plenty of sayings in the gospels that seem to contradict universalism.

So here is another fix - soulless drones. How do I know that you or I actually have a soul? Science seems to suggest that we are automatons and that consciousness is a delusion.

When I think of soul, I think of identity. Our soul never dies, which is the paradox of why if one is judged to die the second death, it must be forever - even if the punishment is not eternal.

A few will be saved because literally a few want to be with God. It is, unfortunately, that simple. He gives us freedom of choice - we get the power to choose to respond to what happens to us (not the trajectory of our lives.) I don't think universalism is the answer, but I think we are underestimating how many people God saved.

First, let's remember the Most High God let Himself be humiliated into human form, and experience the fullness of humanity (ultimately, murdered/death) such that a "few" people could be saved from pure carnality, and get the chance to be Alive. He wouldn't have done that for a null reason. We are currently dead; we have no spirit and our bodies are rotting to death. He didn't lie when He told Adam that he would die that day. We get an "on loan" spirit from God to help us have a conscious - all of us. The Holy Spirit convicts us even if we are in denial. We also underestimate that: in fact, that is why a righteous person before Christ was such a phenomenal entity. These people were just carnal meat suits; the fact that rotting meat suits could actually follow the word of God was why God strove with us.

I would bet my entirety that this "iteration," as it were, of Creation is the one in which the most souls possible are saved while maintaining everyone's privilege of freedom of choice to respond to "stimuli" in creation. He has weighed the odds perfectly. The fact of the matter is that there are people that just do not want to be a part of God's creation. He gives them that choice.

However, there is a temptation to confuse the Most High God with an ignorant God that cant even tell if a faithless human is just product of circumstance (lies,) or denies Him because s/he genuinely doesn't want to be a part of God despite knowledge of Him. There will be a judgment; no one is in hell yet. And, there will be surprises on both sides of judgment - He has already told us this.

Let's take the parable of the sower. Imagine the soil is a population of billions of soulless human drones with no freewill. Spiritual seeds are scattered randomly and a few of these seeds sprout in their human host. These few humans now have a soul; they have been "born again".

All souls are saved, because every soul must be born through the Christian gospel (the seed)

I think this is brilliant. I would replace "the Christian gospel (the seed)" with "the knowledge, respect, obedience toward, love for and faith in [the Word] of God."