One of the things that I always found intriguing about Ronald D. Moore's re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series - both the original series and the reboot, to be honest - was the fact that humans were faced with a foe of their own creation. Artificial intelligence has been a staple of science fiction at least since Shelley wrote Frankenstein. It was tackled by Isaac Asimov; the overarching villain of the Terminator franchise is an AI; even the great Tolkien brought it into play. The problem with artificial intelligence, however, is that we have yet to actually see evidence that it is possible. An adherent of human exceptionalism would probably argue that it is emphatically impossible for man to create another intelligent being, but I have my doubts about human exceptionalism. I'm more interested in whether it is possible, within the framework of a Catholic world view, to admit the possibility of a honest-to-goodness artificial intelligence.
I should probably lead off with the disclosure that my definition of AI might be narrower than that used by technical experts involved in the field. I've never found the Turing Test to be altogether compelling, but rather as a gauge of whether man can fool his fellows, and we already know the answer to that question. Watson (another popular example of AI), on the other hand, is less about fooling people and more of about attempting to reproduce the human brain's ability to store, sort, distinguish and apply large volumes of data and retrieve the relevant bits when presented with a question; and while I would concede that such functionality is indispensable when evaluating AI, it is a part only, and must not be mistaken for the whole. Sometimes it seems to me that, while what is being pursued by scientists is, arguably, the creation of a complete and artificial intellect, what they are really about now is attempting to reproduce the various components of an intellect. The fact remains, however, that when we talk about AI here, we must keep in mind the goal and not the parts. My fundamental question is whether a being can exist that, fabricated, essentially, by man, nevertheless stands alongside him as an equal in dignity before God. In pop culture terms, I'm wondering whether we will ever raise up a Caprica Six.
Now, in order to formulate an answer to the question of whether an artificial being could ever achieve intelligence on par with a human, we have to answer the question of whether it is generally possible for any given being not currently on par with man to actually become on par with man. The answer to that question, in turn, depends on how we reached the point at which we presently find ourselves. These are not questions that admit of definitive answers. I propose, therefore, to offer up answers which I hope are at least reasonable given the knowledge we do possess, and then to see how they hold up.
So...where did our intelligence come from? The most basic answer, for the Catholic, is God. Of course, that's obvious, since any question of origin or causality in the universe must exist in a chain that leads back to God eventually. That makes it an answer that isn't particularly interesting - the trick with questions that fundamentally devolve back on God is to think of them as questions of agency: rather than looking for the Origin, you look at the chain. How might God have chosen to get from point A (absence of intelligence) to point B (presence of intelligence)? Was it as straightforward as the Genesis account of the creation of man makes it seem, with clay being formed and breath being breathed into Adam? Or do we accept what empirical science seems to indicate, that the development of the universe, of life, and ultimately of ourselves followed a gradual process of formation, one level building on the last? Not to antagonize the Creationists - what a horrible misnomer for an ideology - but we are not clay, and while it would not be outside the abilities of God to transmute clay into flesh and bone, I find it unlikely that He would make such a rapid beginning and then plan a vast web of interconnected clues leading us in an entirely different direction. I'm much more inclined to accept that God set in motion a chain of both cosmic and biological evolutionary processes to make us what we are today.
Of course, if we exist in a state that is but the most recent point along a continuum of states, we must have picked up our intelligence somewhere along the line. After all, we know that modern single-cell organisms do not have intelligence, so it is fair to guess that our unicellular ancestors were lacking in that department as well. The question, then, in such an evolutionary model, is at what point along the line does intelligence arise? Religion might suggest that intelligence is an attribute of the human soul, and therefore intelligence would arise at the time that the first man was ensouled. We want to be very careful of making this claim, however. We will want to make certain that, in positing the soul as the answer to the origin of intelligence, we are not merely changing the vocabulary of the question. I bring this up now so that it may be kept in mind (as it will be predominantly addressed in the second post in this series), but essentially if we do decide to advance the claim that intelligence is an exclusive property of the soul, then we will need to explain the observed instances of different degrees of intelligence in various animals - some of them disturbingly close to our own. If we stand by the intelligence-with-ensoulment angle, then we will also have to come to a decision on the status of these others, and that territory is murky indeed.
On the other hand, we might propose that intelligence and soul followed parallel paths. That is a much more speculative line of thinking, and therefore risky from a theological point of view. However, I will approach this avenue of inquiry with as much caution as possible, with a caveat given in advance that I do not consider myself to be a magisterial source (obviously), nor all that specially qualified by discipline. I'm offering these thoughts and their ensuing speculative lines merely as the musings of one lupine, nothing more. Remember, I specifically took this route because I am not just making a philosophical argument in support of AI, but a Catholic one.
So our inquiry now turns on how we might express the idea of the soul existing alongside an intellect not - at least entirely - dependent upon it, and where it makes its appearance in the evolutionary process. Since the soul is now in the equation, we must ask what, precisely, the soul is. The Greeks defined the soul purely as the animating principle of a material body, with various attributes tacked on. The simplest soul is the Nutritive, and essentially just imbues vitality; then there is the Perceptive soul, which allows for movement and feeling - essentially the ability to perceive and interact with the universe; and lastly the Rational soul, which is where the human intellect traditionally comes into play. This is a very neat-and-tidy delineation; but it implies a static universe wherein no meaningful changes occur between types of entity - in other words, it was built before evolution was understood and does not take it into account. This is problematic, because if we admit of the possibility of evolution in some form, then we live in a world where many entities have made the crossover from "Nutritive" to "Perceptive" - and one creature has gone all the way to "Rational." Did we swap souls on the way up the evolutionary ladder? Or are the qualities denoted by this system of classification even integral to the idea of a soul? After all, there are individuals for whom, while Nutritive and Perceptive functions might be present, the Rational has not developed or has atrophied. Often there are purely biological reasons for this. Yet, unless you are sorely twisted in your understanding of humanity, you would acknowledge that these categories of people are still human beings, meaning they still have souls. So, reason may not be the exclusive domain of the soul.
But if intelligence is in some part biological, meaning evolved, then what is left to the soul? We could certainly continue to describe it as the vital force of any creature, but that essentially describes the Nutritive soul. What is there left to make the human being a special case? My first - and, I think, best - thought is that what makes man a special case (what we called in the Baltimore Catechism being "made in the image and likeness of God") is his immortality. Man, we know, lives beyond physical death in his soul. It is an incomplete existence, to be remedied at the General Resurrection, but it is an existence that we have been explicitly informed of through Revelation - whereas your Christmas tree, a mushroom, or dear old Fluffy the gerbil have not received the same explicit assurances. To put it in more cliched language, while I am not saying that all dogs don't go to heaven, we haven't been informed that they are. And that immortality is a quality that I could very easily see arising by Divine decree once the body and mind of the biological human entity reached a certain level of development - "in the fullness of time," as it were.
Now, we loop back to our original line of inquiry for this first post. Which of these two alternatives would form a more favorable ground for a legitimate artificial being: (1) the endowment of a Rational soul upon man by God after a sufficient period of biological evolution, or (2) the endowment of immortality upon the soul of man by God after a sufficient period of evolution to allow for both the body and the mind? If it were any biological organism we were talking about, I would immediately spring for option #2, because it is far easier to reconcile it with the evidence for examples of sometimes-advanced intelligence in non-human forms of life. However, this option presumes the pre-existence of a soul to impart vitality, and any artificial organism I can posit off the top of my head would not need or have a soul in its undeveloped form. There is a vital force in Asimov's robot, Star Trek's android, and IBM's Watson, but it is nothing like the ethereal soul. The soul cannot be detected or measured or contained - we do not, sadly, live in the world of Ghostbusters. Electricity, while undoubtedly capable of animation, does not, I think, come close.
So at first blush, it appears that the best bet for AI in a Catholic - which is to say, the real - world is if there was a specific point of ensoulment. If we take this line of approach, then the next task before us is to situate the class of creatures that exist below the human level, but which still exhibit signs of intelligence classically reserved to man alone. It is not impossible, so I have no problem taking it on, but I'm not decided. Let me make this a little more interesting. As of right now, I am soliciting commentary on which option is more likely/preferable. I know there are only a few people who are active commenters, but I encourage you to cut loose. How would you deal with this question? Which option would you go with? Is there a third, or even a fourth choice that I've failed to discuss?
Let me know...the ball's in your court, now.
0 comments:
Post a Comment