Does AI have qualities like self-awareness or an inner life? How does this compare to our understanding of whether animals have spiritual intelligence?
In this CPOSAT special issue paper, Nicola Hoggard Creegan suggests that spiritual intelligence needs inner experience, linked to human vulnerability and mortality, unlike “immortal” AI.
In this paper I argue that recent reports of AI, and the reactions of people working in AI, together with the possibility of a panpsychist model of intelligence or mentality, make it very difficult to know convincingly what is going on inside AI, and whether or not it has, or might have, subjectivity, inwardness, intelligence, and agency. This problem mirrors, but is different from, the comparison between humans and animals. I argue that spiritual intelligence must assume, at the least, the presence of this inwardness, even though we only have suspicions but no real proof for machines or for ourselves, and also that our understanding of imago Dei is relevant. I compare this conversation with that around animals and end by examining the contribution of vulnerability and death in relational and functional understandings of imago Dei. I argue that these are essential components in the human development and expression of spiritual intelligence, and how this is so very different from anything made by artificial means, which is always functionally immortal.
Read the full paper in CPOSAT.
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