Introduction to a series of essays on artificial intelligence, consciousness and faith
“The question isn’t how much the machine resembles us, but whether there’s someone there to do the resembling”
When we converse with an artificial intelligence that responds fluently, remembers what we said a moment ago, and seems to hesitate, feel pleased or worry, something in us begins to ask a question that, barely a decade ago, sounded like science fiction: is there someone there? This series of short essays is born from that question, and from the conviction that it deserves a considered answer, not merely a reaction.
What this series is about
Every two or three days I’ll be publishing a short essay here, of around a thousand words, tackling a different angle of the same problem: whether a machine’s behaviour, however convincing, reveals that there is real experience behind it, and what it would mean, if it means anything at all, to grant that machine some kind of moral status or even rights. I don’t intend to exhaust the topic in a single post, nor to write a technical treatise on the philosophy of mind. The aim is more modest: to show, piece by piece, how different traditions of thought (analytic philosophy, science fiction, law, neuroscience) have tried to answer this question, and what a Christian perspective, one that almost never appears in these debates, has to contribute in each case, not as just another religious opinion among several, but as an answer with a structure of its own.
Why now
The question isn’t new; what’s new is the urgency. For decades it was a philosophy-seminar thought experiment, comfortably removed from any practical consequence. Today, millions of people converse daily with systems that imitate human conversation with ever-increasing fidelity, some companies are already researching the welfare of their own models, and it won’t be long before some court, in some country, has to rule on the matter. Thinking this through calmly before practical urgency forces us to decide in haste seems, at the very least, prudent.
What you’ll find in the posts to come
Some entries will look at the problem through classical philosophy of mind: what a philosophical zombie is, and why that thought experiment, originally devised against materialism, remains relevant for thinking about artificial intelligence. Others will dwell on functionalism, the idea that consciousness might simply be a set of well-organised functions, and on the voices, such as Daniel Dennett’s, that argued for it most forcefully. There will be an entry devoted to the practical question of where to draw the line: does my computer have rights? What about my phone? And there will be literary entries, the first on a story by Isaac Asimov written fifty years ago that, without knowing it, already anticipated much of this debate, and which also helps us ask whether these decisions end up being made by argument or by carefully engineered emotion.
In each of these entries there will be, towards the end, a section devoted to what the Christian faith has to offer: not as an automatic apologetic closing statement, but as a genuine framework, with a structure of its own, that offers something different from what secular philosophy can offer on its own.
An invitation
You don’t need to agree with every conclusion for the exercise to be worthwhile. It’s enough to be willing to hold an uncomfortable question long enough to think it through properly, rather than settling it with the first reaction a particularly convincing machine provokes in you. If that disposition appeals to you, I invite you to join me for this series. See you in the next entry, in a couple of days.
