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r2b2grady · 7 months

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Generative AI: An Argument for the Soul

This is gonna be a long one, so lemme start out by stating a few things that I am and am not saying.

What I am not saying:

Generative AI is inherently good.

Generative AI is inherently bad.

A machine or other computer-based system with a soul or fully self-conscious sapience is impossible.

Generative AI is incontrovertible proof that there is a soul.

The spirit is good and material is bad (that would be gnosticism, after all).

What I am saying:

The advances in generative AI and the remaining shortcomings thereof are, I think, further evidence for the existence of a soul, a spirit, what-have-you—some spiritual element within our human intelligence that transcends the simply physical/material.

And I’m not going to pretend that I’m the first to make the argument that reason cannot fully explain the phenomenon of reason: literary and theological greats such as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Alvin Plantinga have all made the same point.

So, now that the preamble is out of the way: in AI art, while there’s a lot of fascinating stuff you can generate with it, it’s still very obvious that the AI doesn’t actually understand the prompt—it’s using a probability algorithm, but it doesn’t have any sort of inherent knowledge to cross-reference or anything. For example, these few prompts I made when goofing around with Midjourney:

Prompt: The Call of Cthulhu in the style of a UPA cartoon

Prompt: An eldritch space creature that’s a fusion of a crocodile and a spider, with a chitinous carapace, on the surface of a moon.

It’s creative, but it has an... emptiness to it. There’s no idea that the AI could really understand why these things are good matches for the prompts. And I think AI writing has the same sort of issue (I don’t know of any examples off the top of my head, sadly).

So how does this tie into the idea that there must be a soul? Well, as trite as it is, in many ways, these LLMs are very similar to the human brain. They’re networks of software neurons that communicate in a way that’s modeled off of how the neurons interact in humans and other animals. That’s not to say that LLMs are based on detailed models of human brains, but as far as I understand, there are some broad, basic similarities. And, for all the worries about an AI rebellion or AI overlords overthrowing civilization, we’re seeing that LLMs, while novel and more powerful than previous chatbots/etc., still have their own limitations, and they’re pretty stark when compared to what a human can do.

This on its own, of course, doesn’t prove that AIs couldn’t have the same sort of capability as a human, or possess that level of consciousness/sapience. But it’s another drop in the (to me) ocean of evidence that there is more to our experience than just the physical. The primary point of evidence, however, isn’t exactly new: all three of those authors I mentioned above have pointed it out, and G. K. Chesterton lived from 1874–1936. And as he wrote in 1906:

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." ~ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter III

If all of our thoughts are just molecular happenstance, why should we have any faith that our ability to reason has any reflection of reality?

C. S. Lewis also puts forth much the same argument, in a more detailed way.

All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really ‘must’ be, well and good. BUt if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them—if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work—then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true. It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense. Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’ (Possible Worlds, p. 209) … Any thing which professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what is known, is really a theory that there is no reasoning. But this, as it seems to me, is what Naturalism is bound to do. It offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behaviour; but this account, on inspection, leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends. ~ C. S. Lewis, Miracles (Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis), Ch. 3

Somewhat paradoxically, this is also something that we cannot ourselves reason into reasoning—that is, we cannot use Reason to prove that Reason exists, because then we are using circular logic, and furthermore, we are basing our proof on the thing on trial. To quote Lewis again:

But the very attempt [to prove the naturalistic rising of Reason within the human mind] is absurd. This is best seen if we consider the humblest and almost the most despairing form in which it could be made. The Naturalist might say, ‘Well, perhaps we cannot exactly see—not yet—how natural selection would turn sub-rational mental behaviour into inferences that reach truth. But we are certain that this in fact has happened. For natural selection is bound to preserve and increase useful behaviour. And we also find that our habits of inference are in fact useful. And if they are useful they must reach truth’. But notice what we are doing. Inference itself is on trial: that is, the Naturalist has given an account of what we thought to be our inferences which suggests that they are not real insights at all. We, and he, want to be reassured. And the reassurance turns out to be one more inference (if useful, then true)—as if this inference were not, once we accept his evolutionary picture, under the same suspicion as all the rest. If the value of our reasoning is in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning. If, as I said above, a proof that there are no proofs is nonsensical, so is a proof that there are proofs. Reason is our starting point. There can be no question either of attacking or defending it. If by treating it as a mere phenomenon you put yourself outside it, there is then no way, except by begging the question, of getting inside again. ~ C. S. Lewis, Miracles (Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis), Ch. 3 [emphasis mine]

(I will make a side note here: the issue that I—and I suspect Lewis himself—have with the proposal of reason evolving in humans is the idea that it evolved naturally; that is, without any external force or actor causing it to evolve, but evolving in the sense of it being a purely material element. Evolution itself, as I see it, is very well established, and does not contradict Christian theology at all—I recommend Adam and the Genome by Dennis Venema and Scott McKnight for further reading if anyone is curious)

As I see it, if we believe that our ability to reason has any bearing whatsoever on the real world, beyond the purely coincidental, then we must accept that there is a supernatural element to it—a soul, a spirit, an animus, call it what you will. That is not to say that the brain cannot affect our thought processes—I have a few different mental disorders/neurodivergencies/what-have-you, and am very much on the side of science in that regard. But the brain is not the be-all-end-all when it comes to reason, either. And I think C. S. Lewis put it best when he described the brain as a lens through which our souls/minds view the world (couldn't find the exact quote, so I don't know which book it’s from). We do not live in our brains, nor are we just our brains, any more than the human body is just the heart or just the head.

#theology #my words #ramblings #G. K. Chesterton #C. S. Lewis #generative AI #tw suicide mention (sorta?)

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kpopyancentral · 3 years

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The Spider and The Fly

VII.

(5/5)

He dragged her up his winding stair, into his dismal den,

(6/6)

Within his little parlour—but she ne'er came out again!

(5/5)

—And now, dear little children, who may this story read,

(7/7)

To idle, silly, flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:

(4/4)

Unto an evil counsellor, close heart, and ear, and eye,

(8/8)

And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.

Mary Howitt (1829)

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