Let’s continue our bar room philosophizing with a thought I had while discussing with a good friend of mine. Basically, there are two schools of thought: that of the scientists and atheists and that of the spiritual.
The hardcore scientists as well as the non-believers think that life, emotions, intelligence, consciousness, and love are only natural, hormonal, electrical, and mechanical reactions coded by the DNA in the brain and bodies of every being of the animal or plant kingdoms. Humans are more intelligent than computers because their brains are much more complex and faster. Before long, and with the aid of ultra-powerful quantum computers and “Machine Learning,” we will be able to create intelligence and even love and consciousness by designing a program that will learn to become human by itself, to mimic humanness.
On the other hand, there are those who think that the body is only a more or less efficient vehicle organized by DNA and animated by a transmigrating soul which gives it consciousness and everything that goes with it. In some spiritual beliefs, the soul chooses to reincarnate in a particular body, thus choosing its parents according to the experiences and lessons that it wants to learn on Earth. This is the concept of reincarnation and children choosing their parents. In addition, the vehicle is also more or less stubborn and difficult to control because it is subject to a whole host of earthly temptations. These difficulties are part of the experience that the soul has to learn and experience on earth. In fact, earth is a virtual game of which souls dream and from which they wake up when the vehicle dies.
No judgement on my part as to these two propositions; they are still being debated at the scientific and philosophical level and I will refrain from asserting anything. However, I have my own beliefs. I am in camp number two and imagine that there is a dimension that human technology cannot and should not be able to measure.
This is where we shift towards artificial intelligence. If we assume that all human sentience and consciousness come from the incarnation of a soul in a vehicle, then, for a computer to become intelligent, even human, a soul would have to agree to be incarnated in it. And that, my friends, is not won. Imagine that high level scientists manage to create an ultra-powerful quantum computer. Which soul would be willing to animate it? Is it even compatible? Would it be allowed by the almighty power that governs the universe? What kind of unconditional love can be experienced by incarnating in a computer, no matter how powerful?
What incantations, sorceries, sacrifices, or pacts would the elites of this world have to invoke, commit, or promise to a soul or entity in order for it to agree to incarnate into a computer?
Since this computer has no pineal gland, it will never be able to send messages into the universe through its soul, be able to use the laws of attraction, be transgenerational, nor have a past. In short, it will not be as intimately connected through the only social network that connects all things together: the universe. I’m convinced that you don’t need a lot of computing power to teach a computer to copy human behaviour. It just takes a good machine learning program and millions of hours of interaction with humans to know how to mimic one. But it will never be human because it will be impossible to have real emotions or love. It will only copy behaviour.
Although I’m sure a bee has a soul and there are computers far more powerful than a bee’s brain, no soul has been incarnated into a computer. A bee’s soul may be very young, in its early stage of reincarnation, but, like all of Nature’s creations, the bee is animated by a soul. In terms of surviving in the wild, a bee is far more powerful than a computer or robot since a computer or robot will only survive until its batteries run down. Remember those experiments where scientists mixed all the ingredients and building blocks of life in test tubes and expected life to just happen mechanically and spontaneously but never got very far.
In my opinion—and this is not a sure thing, even if it were possible—I bet that no computer could ever be human. It is not raw computing power that makes a human or intelligence in general; it is the will of a soul which incarnates itself in a living organism, whether it be a plant, an animal, or a human.
To go further, one could also consider transhumanism and the idea of downloading the contents of one’s brain into a computer. I don’t think this will be possible because, although we will be able to copy the structure of the human brain electronically, I am not sure that the soul can follow. Such a process could result in an empty vehicle.
The same goes for those who are cryogenically frozen a few seconds after their death with the hopes of being defrosted in a future where it will be possible to reanimate them and cure the diseases that took them away. Once dead, the soul leaves the vehicle and returns to the source. Even if people who have been dead for a few seconds or even a few minutes have been reanimated before, it is not certain that a soul will wait for years for the body to be reanimated and pick up where it left off.
The same goes for teleportation. Will the soul follow the vehicle if one day we manage to disintegrate a human being atom by atom, send it via an information beam to another end of the universe, and rebuild it?
What about you? What do you think? Skynet?
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