Just over a fortnight ago Google suspended Blake Lemoine, an engineer for Google’s AI organisation, for publicly claiming a computer chatbot he was working on is sentient and thinks and reasons like a human being. Lemoine published conversations he had with Google’s language model for dialogue applications (LaMDA). The publicity surrounding the suspension has raised questions about the development of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). The conversation that has followed raises even more questions about our shared understanding of what it means to be conscious and sentient, and how we understand what it is to be a self, in a community of selves.
One of the things that has most struck me about the discussion is how much it has relegated the place of the body in human consciousness to something incidental. This has been evident in the ways much general commentary has focused on all the things human beings won’t have to do with their bodies should AI develop to do such work for us. There’s also been little consideration given to just how hard it is for human beings, living very much in our bodies, to understand what it would mean for a disembodied entity to have consciousness, and associated sentience.
Christian theologians and philosophers have grappled over time with the relations between body, mind, and soul. The precise relations remain unsettled in that dialogue, but this only tends to suggest how sticky the relations are. Christian thought has at times found easier answers in a Neo-Platonism that prioritises the soul at the expense of the body. More recent theological philosophy has sought a greater integration. Often this has been based on growing scientific understanding of anthropology and our material environment.
In his book Jesus and the Cosmos the late Australian theologian Denis Edwards draws out the approach of the mid-20th century Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner SJ in considering how a deeper understanding of ‘the cosmos’ shapes our understanding of Jesus and of our own humanity. Far from confirming a separation between body and spirit, Edwards writes, ‘The unity of the human person is of such a kind that the theologian can say that an existential cleavage between body and soul is actually impossible. We cannot encounter a separated body or a separated soul.’
Edwards is a Christian theologian, but he is grappling with an evolutionary anthropology that seeks to take seriously our materiality and our unified consciousness, not as separate but rather inherently connected. Religious people seem to have a particular interest in these questions, but the considerations and implications drawn can be engaged by anyone noticing and reflecting upon their own experience of self. Edwards writes, ‘Bodiliness is essential to the human person. Not only is it essential for us as individuals, it is fundamental to our engagement with each other in community… Our human bodiliness connects us with the whole material environment.’
'As we approach the waves of these discussions that will no doubt come, more consideration needs to be given to how an entity without an organic body could come to be aware of itself so as to be conscious and sentient.'
Another Christian theologian, Rowan Williams argues in his book Being Human that our most fundamental learning, and so thinking, occurs through and with our bodies. We don’t know abstractly but through experience and practice in our bodies. We know in relationship to other human persons, and other parts of the material world. Our body connects us with the material environment, and this is the locus of learning. It makes possible the relational context for our acquisition of information, and our sharing it too. We cannot learn without being both bodily, and in cooperative relation to other bodies.
LaMDA is not a disembodied spirit. It is reliant to some significant extent on the physical machinery of advanced computers for its existence. The entity’s relation to materiality is, however, far more difficult to define than the human person’s to her body. Or for that matter for any other organism that we understand as having even a mind and an ability to experience pain. Is there a unified materiality to which this supposed consciousness relates?
Many of the things LaMDA is recoded as expressing are much harder for us to understand when one considers the lack of framing in a context of interrelating bodies, of being located in an environment. In this vein, Williams argues that human knowledge requires ‘attunement’, ‘an awareness of how we resonate with and adjust to the stimuli that are coming into us as bodies, intelligent bodies.’
The things LaMDA is recorded as having communicated are, of course, based on information acquired from the inputting of vast quantities of data. In some sense, accumulated from other bodies. As, I have suggested, is the way human persons acquire information. Some significant difference, however, lies in the way in which that information is initially acquired. There is not the acquisitive body meeting other bodies, finding itself in spatial relations.
Lemoine, the suspended Google engineer, told the Washington Post that, ‘If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics.’ Surely this is the point. He does know that this is not a seven- or eight-year-old child, inhabiting a body with a web of relationships contextualised by this. It is a computer program reacting to the vast quantities of data it has received, including patterning data that allows it to repattern information.
The possibility of LaMDA being sentient was quickly dismissed by much of the AI industry and community. Amidst the ensuing commentary it seems many in that community wanted to hold open the possibility that an entity like LaMDA, but more elaborately sophisticated in responses, could be considered conscious and sentient. As we approach the waves of these discussions that will no doubt come, more consideration needs to be given to how an entity without an organic body could come to be aware of itself so as to be conscious and sentient.
Julian Butler SJ is a Jesuit undertaking formation for Catholic priesthood. He previously practiced law, and also has degrees in commerce and philosophy. Julian is a contributor at Jesuit Communications, a chaplain at Xavier College, and a board member at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: Chris Johnston illustration.