Q&A: On Differences in How Religious and Secular People Relate
On Differences in How Religious and Secular People Relate
Question
1. How would you characterize the people who approached you with questions about artificial intelligence? You’re not a psychologist, but what is the subtext of a discussion with a religious person about artificial intelligence? What kind of dialogue were they expecting? What scares them about artificial intelligence? Is it fear of identifying machines in the future, or דווקא the doubt regarding the uniqueness of the human soul?
2. I’m quoting the last paragraphs from your discussion with "Jonathan":
Jonathan: "I never understood Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment. At a high level of abstraction, human beings think, feel, and understand, but when you zoom in to the level of neurons, we’re all just ant colonies running back and forth in Searle’s room. There’s no contradiction."
Michael: "Intelligence is fundamentally based on judgment and on exercising choice among several techniques or options in a non-deterministic way. When it’s deterministic, intelligence has no meaning at all. I assume that according to your view, water and the electron also have intelligence, just like a computer and just like a human being. There is no real difference between what they do and what the human-machine, according to your definition, does. So there is no need to wait for what you call artificial intelligence to emerge. In principle, one can fall in love with water as well (though it’s a bit hard to converse with it, but with the proper interface that can also be arranged)."
As a secular woman, I’m not sure it would be tragic for me to fall in love with water, or to know that my neurons look like ant colonies running back and forth. You chose to believe that there is a power that will be able to distinguish between a human and a machine in an era when human beings will no longer be able to distinguish between them, and that this is what matters. I don’t know whether there is such a power, and I don’t know how important it is to me that it knows how to distinguish between me and a machine once I no longer can.
How does a question like this sharpen the differences in our positions? Are these the only things that distinguish between us with respect to similar questions about artificial intelligence?
Thank you,
Answer
Before I address your question about the subtext, I have to say that I completely disagree with the subtext that I see in your remarks (the links you take as self-evident between different outlooks and religiosity or secularity). I’ll try to clarify this in the course of my answers to the various points.
1. First, I get inquiries from all kinds of people (especially on the subject of neuroscience and free will, about which I wrote a book), and I don’t always know the views of the person asking, certainly on matters not directly related to the question. Even so, I’ll cautiously say that in my experience there is no significant difference between religious people and non-religious people in these discussions. Some of the most extreme materialists and determinists I’ve spoken with were religious, and vice versa. Moreover, as far as I recall, I haven’t encountered fear among the religious people who contacted me, but simply a desire to clarify the issue. By the way, that’s also my own position. I’m not afraid of anything of the sort. I’m simply trying to clarify the topic and my position regarding it.
And now to the subtext. My impression is that the fears around this issue (as also around clones and other related questions) characterize secular people more than religious ones. I can attribute this to several explanations (here of course I’m in the realm of conjecture and speculation): a. Religious people are sure it isn’t true, so what is there to fear? b. Religious people have God to protect them from the aliens and robotic demons. c. Religious people have halakhic and philosophical principles according to which they discuss this issue and issues in general (in my opinion they are usually much more rational than secular people). By contrast, ethical discussion in the secular world is generally emotional (sometimes people speak in vague catch-all terms like “proportionate” or “disproportionate,” which usually conceal mere feelings). Fear, as is known, belongs to the emotional realm.
2. I also don’t think it would be tragic to fall in love with water and sing it serenades under the window in the middle of the night (as long as it loves you back, of course—otherwise that’s a classic tragedy), except that in my view it simply won’t happen, and even if something does happen there, it won’t be love in the ordinary human sense. People fall in love with human beings, not with simulations of them, or with stones, or clouds (and yes, I saw the film Her. In the fictional world there are older stories too, like Pygmalion).
And two more comments about the subtext: a. Here is an example of smuggling emotional concepts into an intellectual discussion. You asked whether it is terrible to fall in love with water, whereas I am dealing with the question: is it possible to fall in love with water? And is that love? b. Why do you connect this to your being secular? You are also a woman and I am a man, so perhaps the difference lies there? Or perhaps it is simply a difference in taste or philosophy between us. If you ask me, I really do not think this has to do with secularity and religiosity.
3. I did not say that we have the power to distinguish. I do not rule out a situation in which we will be unable to distinguish (on the contrary, that actually does not seem so far off to me). What I argued is that there is a distinction—that these are essentially different kinds of beings. I did not claim that diagnostically each of us will be able to tell them apart. That is the discussion of the Turing test. On the contrary, I have written more than once that even if Her passes the Turing test, it is still not a human being. And if I know that it is a computer, even though it passed the Turing test, I will not fall in love with it, and even if I see someone who did fall in love with it, I would not define that as love but as a delusion or some sort of disorder in the style of Pygmalion.
4. The freedom to define is, of course, endless. One can also speak of an electric pole falling in love with a cloud. And it doesn’t even have to bother me if someone speaks that way (certainly not if it’s done in a poem). Still, in my opinion that will not happen, and it is not love in the accepted sense.
5. Neurons running around like ants is perfectly fine. But as one sees in John Searle’s example, this is running around but not thinking. If it is thinking, then the flow of water too (whether or not you are in love with it) is thinking (in whose mind?). And again, we have returned to the freedom of definition in the age of postmodern nonsense, where metaphors become reality. Once people thought that “the happy prince” was a metaphorical story about human beings. But now you are suggesting that we should see it as a true story about a statue (which is moral and loving and emotional and speaks). I know this sounds paternalistic, but I will still say that it seems to me to be a kind of confusion rather than a philosophical position.
As I understand it, the neurons perform the act of thinking, but they do not think. The intellect is what thinks, and the brain only carries out the action for it. Just as the leg muscles perform the act of walking but do not walk. The human being is the one who walks and thinks. The brain and the legs are organs through which we perform those actions.
6. I did not understand the distinction of “between us” that you mentioned at the end. Do you mean the distinction between a religious person and a secular person, or between Michi and Gitit? This of course distinguishes between a materialist-determinist and someone who is not one (an interactionist dualist, like me). But not necessarily between religious and secular, because there are religious people of various kinds and secular people of various kinds. Again, the subtext.
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Questioner (another one):
From your correspondence it turns out that you do not rule out that a robot could be an intelligent creature and wiser than a human being, only that it is not a human being. According to this, it is difficult for those who hold that the image of God means intellect, since surely a robot does not have the image of God.
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Rabbi:
1. I did not understand the remark. According to their view, a robot does have the image of God.
2. Why do I need to defend other people’s opinions?
3. To the best of my understanding, a robot cannot be an intelligent creature, just as water cannot be intelligent. It has no intellect because it is programmed and does not decide or deliberate.