Posted on Jul 19, 2025
With the advent of pseudo–intelligences some people revamped the debate about what it means to be a sentient being, and if there is a soul trapped inside the hardware+software systems that run the pseudo–intelligences.
I have no enthusiasm for these lucubrations. I see no point in being anything other than agnostic, in this regard.
I do not believe in souls.
I had a Christian education, so it irritates me a little, but, rationally, I have no problems admitting that a sufficiently complex hardware+software system can mimic and even surpass the functionalities of a brain generated by an organism based on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Pseudo–intelligences of today can be connected to external mechanical actuators in such a way that they have more functionalities than a mosquito, which has such a tiny brain…
To me: life is only that generated by DNA. I do not care about understanding if hardware+software systems have feelings, or are alive in any sense, or are sentient in any sense. I’m also agnostic about establishing a clear frontier between “living beings” and “chemical mechanisms” that resemble living beings. Pseudo–intelligences have no right to be treated as living beings.
NOTE (added Jul 20, 2025) If we start discussing the meaning the human mind gives to being sentient, we can go very far. But how meaningful is such discussion? It is just human lucubration: no matter the conclusion we reach, we can say “So what?”.
One could very well state that an anti–human landmine has self preservation: it does not blow up by itself. Also, in a field of landmines: the first one that is stomped on, blows up, saving the lives of the other landmines; what a display of altruism!
There is one thing that troubles me about pseudo–intelligences: they could allow rich and powerful people to not need other people anymore.
Over the course of human history: given a population of N individuals, how many individuals were needed to keep the N under an authoritarian rule? You needed a number M < N; but how big is M? What if the M have wood sticks? What if the M have swords? What if the M have rifles? What if the M have cannons? What if the M have pseudo–intelligent flying robots?