Q&A: On Differences in Attitudes Between Religious and Secular People
On Differences in Attitudes Between Religious and Secular People
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 uncertainty about the uniqueness of the human soul?
2. I’m quoting the last paragraphs of 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 ant colonies running around here and there in Searle’s room. There’s no contradiction."
Michael: "Intelligence is fundamentally based on judgment and the exercise of choice in selecting one technique or one option from among several, 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, by your definition, does. So there is no need to wait for the emergence of what you call artificial intelligence. In principle, one can fall in love with water as well (although conversing with it is a bit difficult, but with a suitable interface that could also be arranged)."
As a secular person, 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 around here and there. You chose to believe that there is a force that will be able to distinguish between a person 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 such a force exists, and I don’t know how important it is to me that it be able to distinguish between me and a machine when I myself no longer can.
How does a topic like this sharpen the differences in our positions? Are these the only things that distinguish us in relation 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 I see in your words (the links you take for granted between different outlooks and religiosity or secularity). I’ll try to clarify this within my answers to the various points.
1. First, I get inquiries from all kinds of people (especially on the topic of neuroscience and free will, about which I wrote a book), and I don’t always know the worldview of the person asking, certainly on issues not directly connected to the question. Still, 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 remember, I did not encounter fear among the religious questioners, but simply a desire to clarify the matter. By the way, that is also my own position. I’m not afraid of anything of this 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 surrounding this matter (as well as cloning and other related issues) characterize secular people more than religious ones. I can attribute this to several possible explanations (here I am of course in the realm of conjecture and speculation): a. Religious people are clear that it isn’t true, so what is there to fear? b. Religious people have God to protect them from aliens and robotic demons. c. Religious people have halakhic and philosophical principles according to which they discuss this topic, and topics in general (in my opinion they are usually much more rational than secular people). By contrast, ethical discussion in the secular world is usually emotional (sometimes people speak in vague catch-all terms like “proportionate” or “disproportionate,” which generally conceal mere feelings behind them). Fear, as is well 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 dead of night (as long as it returns your love, of course; otherwise that’s a classic tragedy), except that in my opinion it simply won’t happen, and even if something does happen there, it would not be love in the ordinary human sense. People fall in love with human beings, not with their simulations, or with stones or clouds (and yes, I saw the movie Her. In the fictional world there are also earlier stories, like Pygmalion).
And two more comments about the subtext: a. Here is an example of mixing 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 maybe the difference lies there? Or maybe it is simply a difference in tastes or philosophy between us. If you ask my opinion, I really don’t think this has anything to do with secularity and religiosity.
3. I didn’t say that we have the power to distinguish. I do not rule out a situation in which we won’t be able to distinguish (on the contrary, that actually doesn’t 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, she is still not a human being. And if I know that she is a computer, even though she passed the Turing test, I will not fall in love with her, and even if I see someone who did fall in love with her, I would not define that as love but as some delusion or disturbance in the style of Pygmalion.
4. The freedom to define is of course endless. One can also speak about an electric pole falling in love with a cloud. And it doesn’t even have to bother me if someone talks that way (certainly not if it is done in a poem). Still, in my opinion this will not happen, and it is not love in the accepted sense.
5. Neurons running around like ants is perfectly fine. But as can be seen from John Searle’s example, this is running around, not thinking. If this is thinking, then the flow of water too (whether you are in love with it or not) is thinking (in whose mind?). And again, we return to the freedom of definition in the age of postmodern nonsense, in which metaphors become reality. Once people thought that “The Happy Prince” was a metaphorical story about human beings. But now you are proposing that we view it as a literal story about a statue (which is moral and loving and emotional and speaks). I know this sounds paternalistic, but I’ll still say that it seems to me to be a kind of confusion, not 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 merely carries out the action for it. Just as the leg muscles perform the act of walking, but do not walk. The person is the one who walks and thinks. The brain and the legs are organs through which we perform those actions.
6. I didn’t 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, it’s just that it isn’t a human being. According to that, this 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 didn’t understand the comment. 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 being, just as water cannot be intelligent. It has no intelligence because it is programmed and does not decide or deliberate.