spoiler alert., question, the soul of a pica

He has a soul as he is making moral decisions quite regularly.

Just not decisions showing very Godly morals.

iranuke wrote:

PeterZ wrote:The answer is simple. If a being is a moral agent, then it has a soul. By definition a moral agent can either accept or reject God's plan. I believe that ability can only be granted by God through his gift of a soul. So it follows that to exercise the ability to make moral choices is to display the influence of a soul on an intelligence.

Does this mean that the Grand Inquisitor has no soul? He definitely is not a moral being.

The usual answer would be that he has moral agency, he simply refuses to act on it.

Basically, IMO, how it would work is this: *If* one presumes an omnipotent God such as Christianity, and the world allows you to create artificial beings with true sapience, then there is likely a method in place for those beings to be given a soul, unless that god is a cruel one. Which most Christians wouldn't really go with.

Or in other words, you couldn't create a true AI if it wasn't part of God's plan in the first place.

He is a moral agent. He can choose between good and evil and has consistently chosen evil.

iranuke wrote:

PeterZ wrote:The answer is simple. If a being is a moral agent, then it has a soul. By definition a moral agent can either accept or reject God's plan. I believe that ability can only be granted by God through his gift of a soul. So it follows that to exercise the ability to make moral choices is to display the influence of a soul on an intelligence.

Does this mean that the Grand Inquisitor has no soul? He definitely is not a moral being.

That raises a good question...can there be a self aware intelligence incapable of moral understanding?

I suspect the answer is yes. Such a being wouldn't have a soul.

Icarium wrote:The usual answer would be that he has moral agency, he simply refuses to act on it.

Basically, IMO, how it would work is this: *If* one presumes an omnipotent God such as Christianity, and the world allows you to create artificial beings with true sapience, then there is likely a method in place for those beings to be given a soul, unless that god is a cruel one. Which most Christians wouldn't really go with.

Or in other words, you couldn't create a true AI if it wasn't part of God's plan in the first place.

Dahak is an AI and shows moral understanding. Are you going to tell him that he doesn't have a soul?

Seriously, until we have (or discover) self-aware AIs, IMO it's impossible to know if they can have moral understanding.

PeterZ wrote:That raises a good question...can there be a self aware intelligence incapable of moral understanding?

I suspect the answer is yes. Such a being wouldn't have a soul.

Icarium wrote:The usual answer would be that he has moral agency, he simply refuses to act on it.

Basically, IMO, how it would work is this: *If* one presumes an omnipotent God such as Christianity, and the world allows you to create artificial beings with true sapience, then there is likely a method in place for those beings to be given a soul, unless that god is a cruel one. Which most Christians wouldn't really go with.

Or in other words, you couldn't create a true AI if it wasn't part of God's plan in the first place.

Agreed. My point is that intelligence is different from moral understanding.

DrakBibliophile wrote:Dahak is an AI and shows moral understanding. Are you going to tell him that he doesn't have a soul?

Seriously, until we have (or discover) self-aware AIs, IMO it's impossible to know if they can have moral understanding.

PeterZ wrote:That raises a good question...can there be a self aware intelligence incapable of moral understanding?

I suspect the answer is yes. Such a being wouldn't have a soul.

Aethor wrote:I wouldn't say that someone >>has a<< soul, it would be more correct to say that someone >>is a<< soul, and has a body for that soul, much like he has clothes for that body.

As for the archbishop Maikel, he chose to believe that Merlin is actually Nimue (as in, the same soul, that in ages past used to be Nimue) simply because he wanted to believe that, and/or because it was easier for Merlin, and Maikel wanted to make it easier for Merlin.

But The good archbishop didn't have any proof for it, of either religious or scientific nature, he simply decided to believe what he liked to be truth. And he didn't hide that fact, he didn't say that he has any sort of God-given knowledge.

So, archbishop Maikel's opinion cannot be taken as a proof of anything...

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Aethor's concept here is really more akin to the old Hebrew concept of nefesh. Nefesh refered to life in its entirety. In Genesis God breathes into man the breath of life and man becomes a living being. The Greeks were a bit different. They regarded the material to be unreal or even evil and thus purity becomes escaping the body. This is where the concept of the soul (in Greek psyche) comes from. Think about Plato's allegory of the cave. If you are unfamiliar with that google it. The New Testament although written in Greek is prmarily Hebrew philosophically. In the early centuries of the church, Greek thought became very dominate. In fact an excellent case can be made that most of the early heresies happen as a result of reading the Bible through a Greek lens.

I think that words like soul don't really translate well in modern thought. As a pastor, I used the word person in the Hebrew sense of nefesh, usually to stress the inter-relatedness of the person with other persons and the world that surrounds and sustains us.

Don

I would not expect RFC to tell us in HFQ, or any other book, whether or not Nimue III and Merlin have souls.
I imagine that he thinks they do (and I'm not sure how he squares that with any traditional understanding of a soul, but since I don't believe they exist no matter...) but it would really not be his style to bring it out in text-ev.

As far as I can tell, the only religious principles he has consistently articulated in his works are:
1) there is some form of divinity which loves humanity
and
2) thou shalt not bring violence and compulsion into religion
I disagree wholeheartedly with 1), agree wholeheartedly with 2), and can't see how either of them can be squared with a specific theological point like how souls copy and paste when personalities copy and paste between PICAs, databanks and human minds.

That said, it does raise some interesting issues; similar ones, perhaps, to the question of whether people who pass through a Stargate (or a Star Trek transporter) die and are resurrected, or are the same people? There is after all no physical continuity, and the originals are presumably destroyed.
I would be surprised if souls could split - wouldn't somebody then be left with half a soul? It would also seem odd that Nimue's soul would hang about for a millennium before reawakening in her PICA.
If they can't split (but then what about identical twins, who start as one embryo?) then there have to be new souls, which raises its own issues - like when did OWL get a soul? Does OWL get a soul, in fact? We are told OWL is self-aware by now...
Or mechanical beings don't get souls, but biological ones do, yet that seems untenable on the face of it. What if a species migrated entirely into PICA-equivalents? (If you've got the industry it's certainly easier than biological functioning...) Do they stop getting souls and become entirely dumb matter? And how does the idea that a soul can integrate un-ensouled experiences when a fleshly being downloads what their PICA got up to work?

To my mind the easiest thing is to accept that there are no souls, it's a colourful form of language that doesn't represent anything real, but I can see why the Mad Wizard doesn't want to delve into it too far in the books. They're going to be long enough as it is!

There also are no PICA's or AI's. I very much believe in the soul of a person. but my belief is for this world. trying to figure out if a soul could in fact inhabit a machine like a pica is entirely the realm of the author. If you believe in the concept of a soul that is eternal, what is a thousand years to wait to wake up in a pica. certainly not out of the bounds of possibility, but the split soul thing is something I have trouble with on an intellectual basis. theologically in the real world I don't believe it could happen. but the books are only real in our and the authors imagination so however he chooses to resolve this issue will be interesting. and I agree that I don't expect him to spell out that this soul split or is a new soul or there never was a soul etc. but I suspect there will be discussion and the archbishop will likely give his opinion on the subject as will others so we will be able to discern to a certain extent what the author believes happens in his universe.

While you may be right, I have to wonder. If the soul is the province of God, why can't He imbue it into whatever appropriate vessel He chooses?

Furthermore, since The Bible is a document describing an expanding set of revelations from Genesis to the New Testament, can't we assume that God will incorporate man's decisions into His Plan?

If both statements are true, then a PICA with a soul is not theologically inconsistent with Christianity. Even two separate PICAs of one physically dead individual.

mustangman wrote:There also are no PICA's or AI's. I very much believe in the soul of a person. but my belief is for this world. trying to figure out if a soul could in fact inhabit a machine like a pica is entirely the realm of the author. If you believe in the concept of a soul that is eternal, what is a thousand years to wait to wake up in a pica. certainly not out of the bounds of possibility, but the split soul thing is something I have trouble with on an intellectual basis. theologically in the real world I don't believe it could happen. but the books are only real in our and the authors imagination so however he chooses to resolve this issue will be interesting. and I agree that I don't expect him to spell out that this soul split or is a new soul or there never was a soul etc. but I suspect there will be discussion and the archbishop will likely give his opinion on the subject as will others so we will be able to discern to a certain extent what the author believes happens in his universe.