Book: Sceptical Spirituality
Artificial Intelligence (AI), sentient machines, and metaphysics
Ground zero, knowledge-wise?
Let us imagine a machine so intelligent that it ‘knows’ everything, in terms of up-to-date, fact-based, transferable, objective and subjective human knowledge. Is there then anything left for it to know? Can it answer the question ‘what’s existence all about?’ No, because such a question is not related to fact-based knowledge, and never will be.
The debate (or ongoing discussion) about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, when it comes to metaphysics and spirituality, extremely interesting and provocative — insofar as it brings directly into play a number of crucial issues — but the debate, unfortunately, collapses in on itself when we start asking genuinely metaphysical questions. AI — no matter how advanced it becomes — does not and cannot destroy, for once and for all, the key questions which the human condition imposes on those who somehow come to recognise the human metaphysical predicament for what it is.
And what is that predicament? Not knowing ultimately ‘what’s what’, yet feeling/sensing that it might, against all the evidence, be somehow possible to find out ultimately ‘what’s what.’ In other words, what is the point of existence in the first place?
