Joe Bennett (Are we about to hit self-destruct button?, October
18) would have us all shaking in our shoes at the prospect of being put in a zoo
by artificially intelligent machines.
But if consciousness is ‘just the product of a brain’ and includes
‘beliefs’, that means animals – who also have brains - have beliefs and act on
them; but they don’t. They do not have beliefs.
It follows that humans, because they do have beliefs and act on them,
possess a faculty other than the brain, a faculty which endows the human with
knowledge of good and evil. That faculty is the soul, and it is utterly beyond
‘programming’.
The brain is mortal, whereas the soul is eternal and, thank God, is his
concern and care. No matter how many ‘bits’ of the brain we might reproduce
electronically, the soul is and always will be beyond the reach and
comprehension of Stephen Hawking, however how ‘well-informed’ he may be.
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