Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by high_priest 15 days ago
There is no soul. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist.

I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)

4 comments

It's an interesting hypothesis. I think there's something elegant about "soul" or even consciousness being an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system. But I struggle with really squaring that with my own first-person sensation of experiencing existence (which I assume you and everyone else has but I can never actually know for sure).
> the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself.

You should try your hand at sci-fi writing. You may be onto something there. You seen Westworld?

Babies don't sustain themselves. Do babies have souls?
I swear I remember once reading about a culture where babies don't have souls until they're named. Maybe something about gaining their own distinct identity?
username checks out!