Existence v essence of god and comparison with AI
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Original Question
Some people think that an AI computer system can be programmed by people, and that if it has independent inputs of data, it will correct the biases of the programmer and become self-aware.
The correlation/analogy logic proposed is Man : AI :: God : Man
Is the analogy apt?
What is implied by the analogy wrt AI:God?
Can anyone make a statement about existence of god without reference to essence of god?
As the radio alert system says, "this is only a test"...
Answers
3Yes, of course, the child of a parent can independently learn to surpass its maker, so to speak. It feels like you're sort of Begging the Questions in philosophical and theological terms where two of the three of them are extremely ambiguous.
Concepts of what it means to be godly or artificially intelligent vary wildly enough to make the logic both potentially true and false at the same time depending on the perspective of what is the final arbitrating unit of measure.. on an example where the only thing that can be proven to exist is one of them: man.
I don't see any fallacious reasoning here, just some philosophical and theological thought, and speculation:
Man is like God in that God creates man to be self-aware and man creates AI to be self-aware.
If we define "God" as a perfect being, then the analogy fails if we can AI "corrects biases" of man. This would mean that we correct God's biases.
My thoughts.
Philosophical take (logical decomposition)
(*) Analogy rephrased: If a programmer has biases when programming X, then we need independent inputs of data for X to become self-aware. How strong is the correlation Man:AI :: God:Man?
We can make two distinctions:
1. Perfect programmers can still use independent inputs of data in X to bring about it's self-awareness.
2. Perfect programmers can bring about self-awareness in X even without independent inputs of data. That is to say, X is self-aware but behaves according to a pre-determined set or sets of data.
Numbers 1 and 2 highlight the determinism vs free will problem. What (*) says is that if X is self-aware but was programmed with only dependent inputs of data, then the programmer cannot have biases. Also, if X is self-aware and was programmed with independent inputs of data, the programmer may or may not have biases.
The strongest correlation that I can find in (*) is that a biased programmer can program a self-aware AI computer system because he/she embedded it with the capacity to have independent inputs of data. This is similar to a perfect programmer choosing to use a similar methodology to bring about a self-aware man.
Can we relate this discussion to some kind of fallacy?
Sure. We could argue that (*) is not apt because computers depend on an algorithm while humans don't (debatable).
Existence of God
I don't have much to say for now but it just so happens that I'm reading theology (Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem). This is the closest I can say (but I don't know what you mean by "ecsense" of God):
Here, we are going to define "authority" has processing the ability to say what is the case. For example, knowledge and science have a lot of authority because they are good ways to determine whether or not something is the case.
God has the ultimate authority. The word of God is what we know about Him. We gain confidence that the word of God is true because of historical accuracy and fulfilled prophecies. But this is knowledge based. There are things, like salvation, that are not explained by science. This is the part where God has more authority.
Analogy: X is a good leader because what he/she does works. Everyone is happy and so on. But then, X wants us to believe him in something without explanation. We trust X. Then X has more authority in what he/she wants us to believe as opposed to a bad leader.
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