By TOM GILSON, The Stream, Published on October 19, 2021
Item: Scientists working with musicians have released “Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony,” composed by AI (artificial intelligence) from the composer’s own unfinished notes.
Item: Facebook is fitting 3,000 humans with sensors in a long-term attempt to create an AI device to “[teach] AI to understand daily life activities through human eyes in the context of real-time motion, interaction, and multisensory observations.”
Item: The question of “robot rights” is coming to the fore.
Item: An article at The Humanist calls for “expanding humanism to clearly and robustly include sentientism.”
The new word there needs explaining. It begins with granting “moral consideration” to sentient beings other than humans. I quote now from the article:
The most obvious candidates for moral inclusion are animals other than humans. While scientific debate continues on the margins (sea sponges, for example, are animals with no brain or nervous system), it’s clear that most animals, particularly those we farm in the trillions, are sentient. If we care about suffering and flourishing then it’s sentience, not species membership, that matters.
Summary: The world has no idea what it means to be human.
No Greater Ignorance
There is no greater ignorance. We strut and preen as the “most enlightened humans” of all time, but we’ve become the most idiotic instead.
(By “we,” I do not mean every person alive or even every reader here. The craziness is not universal. It’s widespread enough, though, and “they” seems so accusatory, so I will keep on using “we.”)
“Divinity” itself has descended to that depth, and men seek to follow it there, down where the sea sponges live, and lower yet.
Fifty years ago we left human footprints on the moon. Now we don’t know what “human” is.
We’re the most advanced people ever, and the most confused. On the one hand we cling to world’s oldest sin, our first and worst error, the wish to be like God. We will gladly idolize ourselves as divine. At the same time we will just as eagerly descend to a state of mere nature. We believe we belong among the gods; we equally believe we belong among the sea sponges.
Inevitable Confusion
This self-contradiction was inevitable as soon we rejected the true God and our true relationship to Him. Jewish and Christian truth teaches that we occupy the highest possible status of any created thing. No other being is created in God’s image; not even the angels, as we learn in Hebrews 1 and 2. We alone of all God’s visible created world have freedom of thought, freedom of will, the ability to love, and the means to make morally significant choices.
If only we had chosen to be who we are (in the right sense, of course). But we rejected that. It was a natural consequence of rejecting God, for by denying Him we must deny our favored relation to Him. So it was that in the fall we became less than we are; and now in the 21st century we are trying to become even less.
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I liked the reasoning herein. It affirms what I think, that God is reason and separation from God is chaos. The confusion is the chaos that follows separation from God. It is folly.