Can Machines Achieve Spirituality?

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Via geek.com by Stephanie Mlot

They communicate and interact, they cook and clean, they protect and serve. But can machines ever achieve spirituality?

The answer, according to Quartz, depends on how you define “machine.”

Some people believe humans are machines—in as much as all things, including our consciousness, are results of material interactions.

And if these so-called “materialists” are right, “then we know that machines can be spiritual,” Robert Geraci, religious studies professor at Manhattan College, told the news blog.

Speaking at a recent conference on religion and artificial intelligence at Stanford University, Geraci explained that “human beings operate according to machine-line principles.”

“We are information-processing, pattern-recognizing systems,” he said. “We have these modes of interaction with the world that involve input and output.”

But that’s not enough to bridge the gap between humans are machines.

“Machines are tools,” Geraci continued. “When someone says human beings are ‘machines,’ that’s a strange reflection on what those words might mean and it reinvents meaning for both ‘human beings’ and ‘machines.'”


Daniel Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University and prominent advocate of materialism, begs to differ.

“The best reason for believing that robots might someday become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves,” he wrote in a 1994 paper on AI consciousness.

After all, he argued, we are self-controlling, self-sustaining mechanisms, designed and operating according to the same principles that govern all other physical processes in living things, including digestive, metabolic, and reproductive practices.

A believer in the philosophy of materialism—that individuals are formed entirely of physical matter—Geraci foresees a future in which robots share every human capability. In which case, a machine that mirrors humanity must be spiritual.

“Spiritual pursuits are part of the human condition,” he said, as reported by Quartz. “If machines didn’t pursue any kind of spiritual reflection, then we wouldn’t consider them to be persons, to be conscious.”

Traditionally referring to a religious process of reformation, modern spirituality puts more of an emphasis on values and the meanings by which we live—often separate from organized religion.

Geraci, however, defines the term as a search for purpose and meaning “that goes beyond the everyday; to seek transcendent values.”

Will machines eventually chase such extraordinary ideals? Only time will tell.

One thing’s for sure: Artificial intelligence is no stranger to religion.

Late last year, journalist and podcaster Rose Eveleth teamed up with research scientist Janelle Shane and her neural network to find out “what would happen if a scientist one day tried to create a new religion by training a computer on all the existing texts of world religions?”

The results were sinfully unholy.

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