Does AI have a Soul? - Jonathan Pageau

@PageauJonathan If we take the hermetic view that all is mind, AI too is an expression of consciousness.

@PageauJonathan Revelation 13:15 “And it was given to him to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause all those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.”

alternative if math is the ultimate bottleneck of intelligence and it scales with compute then the simulation theory is likely 1/ If intelligence is just math + compute, then a civilization that has already scaled far past us could run many high fidelity simulations of lower tech civilizations as a matter of course (Bostrom’s classic argument). 2/ The fact that we are discovering that intelligence itself is computational rather than magical removes one of the traditional objections "consciousness/experience can’t be simulated"

@PageauJonathan NO

@PageauJonathan No, but it has a g-spot.

@PageauJonathan Nope. AI has no mind.

@PageauJonathan A soul should be defined by experience and not derived from knowing facts or information sets such as language. Pageau put it nicely - AI can describe attributes of a cat, but it can never experience its presence, therefore it is not conscious of it. No conscious, no soul

@PageauJonathan Does a subversive like yourself have a soul.

@PageauJonathan No

@PageauJonathan When the cyclops is eating Odysseus's crew, is it thinking that the crew have souls? Why should it think that?

Wrong question, and I say that as someone who's built a company on top of AI, not just written about it. AI doesn't have a soul. It doesn't need one to be dangerous or useful. The real question is whether the humans using it still do. I watched an industry full of very soulful underwriters get automated into spreadsheet monitors. Nobody asked if the software had a soul. Should've asked if the humans running it still brought theirs to work.

@PageauJonathan AI is autocomplete at scale. It predicts the next likely series of tokens for a given input, which is 100% based on the sum total of documented human existence. There is no soul, emotion or conscience, just a very, very good simulation of the human condition ...