Stats for nerds
2recommend
13mentions
12people
2017–2026years
15% recommend85% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This is a pretty common question that's raised: how can we square this with loving our fellow man?
The short answer is Christianity isn't a utilitarian belief system. While God loves everyone equally, he puts some of us closer together in love: family, friends, neighbors, countrymen. This incurs a greater obligation, plus we ought to love more those who are closer to us.
Sadly, a lot of Christian faiths teach dogma before the underlying reasoning or take a Bible-only approach which I find to be incredibly incomplete. In case your upbringing didn't include much theological reading, I would strongly recommend Civitas Dei and Summa Theologiae; the latter is less explicitly relevant to its definition but probably a better book overall.
- Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas
- The most obvious one is the "god of the gaps" problem now applied to intelligence. If you look at things like Aquinas' Summa Theologiae [1] you'll see that there are explicit assertions that things like rationality transcend corporeal nature. As such the more examples we have of AI behaving in rational ways, we will be forced to conclude that either rationality does not transcend nature (removing the last remaining gap where we can invoke a supernatural explanation) OR that we have created artificial souls.
[1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm
I think theologians will hang on for a while saying "what AI is doing isn't really rationality". But eventually the theologians are going to face a reckoning: what AI is doing will look so much like rationality that they will be required to answer the question "what specifically differentiates the two?" and then they will be stuck. Neuroscience does not understand how our brains produce rationality nor do our AI scientists understand what algorithms their neural nets are implementing post-training. Therefore, any specific claim the theologians make runs the risk of immediately getting invalidated by some scientific discovery on either side (theologians these days are generally smart enough to avoid putting themselves in that position.)
- > The rational soul can be made only by creation.
From Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. The argument this article presents does seem very similar. Weirdly, the article itself is very dismissive of religion, while making a similar argument to the one Aquinas made 750 years ago.
- "It is requisite that a man should arrange the things he wishes to remember in a certain order, so that from one he may come to another: for order is a kind of chain for memory" – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Not ironically I found the passage in my Zettelkasten.
- Relatedly, it would be bordering on impossible to convince Iran about the validity of Augustine, Aquinas or Calvin, but it was fairly easy with nuclear physics. Theology isn't "based on nothing", but the convincing power of the quantum physics books happens to be radically different from Summa Theologiae, even if both are just books written by educated people based on a lot of thought and prior work.
