Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

What’s to Stop an AI System from having a Spiritual Soul?

John Doran in a comment presents an argument worth bringing to the top of the pile:

A) Anything conscious has a non-material basis for such consciousness.

B) Certain AI constructs [systems] are conscious.

Therefore:

C) Such AI constructs [systems] have a non-material component in which their consciousness resides.

Why doesn't that work? It's obviously valid.

In short, and in the philosophical colloquial, when a man and woman successfully combine their mobile and sessile gametes, a human person is brought into existence, complete with a soul.

So why can we not bring an ensouled being into existence as a result of the manipulation of silicon, plastic, metal, coding, and the application of electricity?

A provocative question.  But before he asked the question, he gave an argument. The argument is plainly valid. But all that means is that the conclusion follows from the premises. A valid argument is one such that if all the premises are true, then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. But are both premises true? I am strongly inclined to accept (A), but I reject (B).  The various arguments from the unity of consciousness we have been discussing convince me that no material system can be conscious. How does John know that (B) is true? Does he have an argument for (B)? Can he refute the arguments from the unity of consciousness?

Now to his question.

John appears to be suggesting an emergentist view according to which, at a certain high level of material complexity an "ensouled being" (his phrase) emerges or comes into existence from the material system.  His view, I take it, is that souls are emergent entities that can arise from very different types of material systems. In the wet and messy human biological system, a mobile gamete (a spermatazoon) mates with a sessile gamete, an ovum, to produce a conceptus such that at the moment of conception a spiritual soul comes into existence.  In a non-living silicon-based hunk of dry computer hardware running appropriately complex software, spiritual souls can also come into existence. Why not?

Emergence is either supernatural or natural.

Supernatural emergence is either Platonic or Christian. On the former, God causes pre-existent souls to take up residence in human bodies at the moment of biological conception.  On the latter, God creates human souls ex nihilo at the moment of conception.  Thus on the latter the coming to be of a human being is a joint task: the conjugal act of the parents supplies the material body and God supplies the spiritual soul.

Natural emergence involves no divine agency. Souls emerge by natural necessity at a certain level of material complexity, whether biological or computational. Edward Feser, in his discussion of William Hasker's emergent dualism, mentions a dilemma pointed out by  Brian Leftow.  (Immortal Souls, 2024, 517.) I'll put it in my own way. Souls either emerge from matter or they do not.  If they emerge, then they could only be material, which contradicts the assumption that they are necessarily immaterial.  If they do not emerge,  then they could be immaterial, but could not be emergent.  

The natural emergence from matter of an immaterial individual (substance) is metaphysically impossible.  The very notion is incoherent.  It follows that immortal souls cannot naturally emerge either biologically or computationally. The only way they could emerge is supernaturally.

There is a second consideration that casts doubt on naturally emergent dualism.  Does a spiritual soul, once it emerges, continue to exist on its own even after the material emergence base ceases to exist? In other words, are souls emergent entities that become ontologically independent after their emergence, or do they remain dependent upon the matrix, whether biological or silicon-based, from which they emerged? 

I'm inclined to say that 'naturally emergent dualism of individual substances' is a misbegotten notion.  Property emergence is a different story. I take no position on that. Leastways, not at the moment.

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Bill Vallicella

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2 responses to “What’s to Stop an AI System from having a Spiritual Soul?”

  1. Dominik Kowalski Avatar
    Dominik Kowalski

    I’d like to approach that question from a more Aristotelian conception of the soul, where it’s the form of the body. This gives us one advantage though, because we can draw parallels to the observed emergence in the philosophy of biology
    https://plato.stanford.edu/archIves/fall2024/entries/biology-philosophy/
    chemistry
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chemistry/
    and yes, arguably even physics (Cartwright (2022), A Philosopher looks at Science, p. 107 ff.).
    The emergence here, which amounts to a consensus position in the first two areas, is ascribed always then, when the physical constituents don’t explain the properties or, in the case of biological organs, the functions.
    Of course, these emergent aspects are non-physical; they are not identical to the physical constituents and their quantitative arrangement. That’s also the basis of Jaworskis argument in “Why Materialism is False and why it has Nothing to do with the Mind”. At the same time, it’s of course not the same type of spiritual non-physicality that Hasker would like to identify with the soul, but non-physical nevertheless.
    Hence I agree that John Dorans argument is valid. The parallel is false; our reproductive organs and in fact our entire body is already an emergent system in a relevant sense. And there’s no better example for a teleological process than embryology (well, perhaps the immune system). Good luck trying to make sense of this in the language of fundamental physics.
    My approach has the advantage of being a principled ascription, that we can use for AI systems as well. And now we get to the interesting question: is there anything in the processing of the algorithms and the production of the output? Is there anything currently done that could not in principle be run on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, where nobody would ever confuse it for a thought? Do we have examples of irreducible code emergence?
    If we have this, then maybe we can have a conversation about AI intelligence or consciousness. Otherwise, I’d make the following argument:
    A) In order for something to be conscious, we need more than the mere arrangement of physical parts.
    B) AI is nothing other than arrangement of physical parts.
    C) Therefore AI is not conscious.
    with the justification for B) being that unlike in the cases of biology, we have no function in algorithmic systems that couldn’t in principle be reduced to the physical parts and, in the case of information, to a conscious agent who gave semantics to the syntax.

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  2. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    There is a third option to consider (the one I, in fact, tend to believe is possibly true):
    (AI): If we arrange the appropriate material substrates in the appropriate fashion, then GOD will infuse the resulting substance with a rational soul.
    God infuses human zygotes with souls because he has established a natural order according to which He has committed Himself to doing so.
    In the same way: He will not annihilate human souls, because to do so would be to contravene the (super)natural laws that He Himself has set in place; He will not stop thinking about the number 5, the color “blue”, or the 3-sided closed plane-figure with internal angles that have a sum of 180 degrees; and He will not contravene the putatively free choices of his freely-choosing creations.
    So, given those assumptions, why not (AI)?
    Or, more nefariously, why not (AI’):
    Given the right conjunction of material substrates, angelic intelligences are enabled to enter such constructs and use them to their own designs.
    I cannot think of a reason that either (AI) or (AI’) is necessarily false as a matter of simple logic or metaphysics (i.e. without the introduction of a number of theological considerations.)

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