Could a robot be christian?

Humans were created with the freedom to choose for themselves but a robot cannot choose for itself.

 

BooBoo

Freedom to choose is a product of abillity and the parrameters allowed
by objective reality.
A Machine intelligence with even an IQ of 70 [about the same as GW Bush]
Can choose within available options.

A 'robot' is not machine intelligence. It is a programmed self standing or a waldo.

MI is consciousness generated by a non biological brain.
A proposition just as valid as consciousness generated by
a biological one.

Occam

 

if it has sufficient and sufficiently flexible complexity for an awairness to occupy it, an awairness is an awairness is an awairness.

my personal belief is that awairnessess are NOT generated by their tangable hosts
so the question of the organicness of those hosts is not in and of itself directly pertinent.

if and when sufficently flexible and complex nonorganic potential hosts come into being,
we shall see what we shall see.
personaly i don't see the motivation for attempting to create them.

the concept has allways been one of a kind of gosh wow novelty.
perhapse with the intent of being a moral excuse for keeping slaves?

if, by virtue of awairness we possess rights, then by the same logic,
any awairness possess those same rights.

=^^=
.../\...

 

Themnax

Would you not 'really' like to talk with such an awareness?
Occam would.
Far more worthy to create ONE nonhuman mind than sit back and yawn
while humanity creates 10's thousands more humans each day that our species does not need.
[where way more than 50% of new people are a result of conditioning]

And true. It 'could not be by any rational moral standard'
a slave.
In fact we would be obliged to allow it all that we allow ourselves.
Mobility, senses, social rights.

To create a thinking box on a table would be an abomination.

In occam's opinion, the creation of just one MI would be of VAST
benefit to human understanding of mind, and reality.

Occam

 

unless of course we programmed it to be able to do so.

 

Could a christian be a robot?

 

could a christian not be a robot?

 

I think robots would be bhuddists
Christians are rather boring anal retentives whos philosophy isnt all that nice. It is a devisive and people hating philosophy that seeks to segregate rather than conjoin.
AI robots would have one primary purpose - to think.
It seems to me a thinker would not become a dogmatist
A thinker would want to conjoin their knowledge and share the experience - its why william gibson wrote his philosophical novels that advocate the conjunction of man and machine - yes I believe robots may want the stimulus of thinking at such a level but not the dogma that is necessitated by adopting such a crass and patently childish book such as the bible

As I said in another thread - theres a shortage of trees and not enough toilet paper - what solution should there be?
Hmm the bible is the book, according to christians that sells the most
The book according to me should be recycled.

Sorry I've got go and have a shit at this point - now wheres that bible?

 

Black Bill

Good point.
Unfortunately the bible is never upated to keep it in line with
current human ability.
There are literally hundreds of examples of things we can now do that
would be true miracles at the time the bible was assembled for mass consumption.
We bring people back from the dead on a regular basis.

The bible cannot be a guide to the question
'could a christian not be an MI'
Cause it was writen by men who had not the faintest conception of
what a Machine Intelligence is.
The most complex machine in their time was a screw pump.

This is one more nail in the coffin for the viability of the bibles outlook in
our time.
The parables of wisdom it contains are valid and timeless.
The STORY they are part of is ...well.
Stupid.
That supposedly educated adults propose 'creationism' as fact.
Underlines this point precisely.

Occam

 

I fully agree that the bible is not really very relevant in our times (if if ever was).

It doesn't address the real issues we face today, and is based mainly on ignorance.
It can't help at all with issues like climate change, genetic research, AI etc.

I say christians are robotic because they aren't allowed to think for themselves or decide what their real values are.

What could be more robotic than a bunch of people who, after 2,000 years of religious wars, send cards out proclaiming 'peace on earth'?

 

Black Bill

Yes, have found over the decades a very unusual aspect to
christian/islamic thought.

The idea of hell seems to be held to more tightly than the idea of heaven.
This is 'really interesting'
Why, would the concept of hell be defended with greater vigor than
the concept of heaven?

Occam suggests that it is because the concpt of punnishment
carries more weight than reward.
We 'believe' that good, being such a fine thing, must be inherently its own
reward even to the good who die in pain.

Yet the idea that evil can escape the horror it caused by a bullet to the brain, and suffer no more,, ever.
Is not justice.
That stalin or hitler suffered a few seconds. yet they killed 10's of millions.

We want justice.

Could an MI understand this?
Occam says yes. Any reasoning being could.
The religious may be misled but at heart they are just like you and me.

We want justice and peace.
We want adventure and dreams.
We want love and friends

Purpose

Occam

 

though it may be possible to program a robot with all the historical christian data, the fact would remain that being a christian is more than just spouting data. Maybe you should ask whether a robot could take LSD and have a psychedelic experience? Because being a christian is a subjective experience as well.

 

You have no idea what actually constitutes intelligence do you - otherwise you wouldnt be talking about programming

 

Sentient

Exaclty
'Programming' Has one relation to higher thought process.
It relates only to structural support for such 'thinking'

Programming allows data to go to the right places
It does not. decree or produce conscious thought or intelligence.

We are all born with a Built In Operating System

BIOS

Occam

 

*Buddhists

Sorry this is off topic but it seems to be a growing fashionable trend; people praising buddhism as if it is any different than the other major religions. You spend some time talking to buddhists and scratch beneath the surface you see that's it's just the same as other religions: Intolerant and requires a certain amount of blind faith in the metaphysical and in dogma. Sure, it doesn't have a creator god, but it does have other metaphysical realms where 'god-like' beings are supposed to dwell; gods, demi-gods, hell etc These require faith and so are just as irrational as the christian concepts of heaven and hell. Little difference at the end of the day...Reincarnation is also paradoxical in buddhism since buddhists supposedly believe in 'no soul' (or no permanent 'self') yet they claim that something 'transmigrates' from this body to the next...Quite a major flaw since the other key concepts of karma and emptiness depend on reincarnation. This concept also requires faith.
Other flaws; buddhism is supposed to be about 'non-attachment' and eliminating desire, so a.) why do they attach themselves to labels such as 'buddhist' in the first place? b.) Why start a religious institution called buddhism? c.) actually wanting to end desire is a desire, quite a powerful one too. How is this 'non-attachment'?
Then there's the horribly condescending attitude towards non-buddhists and the egotistical "We are going to save you all from your ignorance and delusion and free you from the cycle of suffering" holier-than-thou attitude.

So really I have no idea why you would claim that robots would be buddhists (<just realised how ridiculous this sounds lol).

Not saying all of it is bad, a lot of buddhist concepts (apparently, though i'm no sceintist) are in agreement with quantum physicists assesments about the universe ('quantum phenomena' experiment) and the general idea behind the nature of suffering seems very rational, but as an established religion it's just as wank as the rest.

 

I agree that hell is emphasized more than heaven, and also with your analysis that fear of punishment has more effect than expectation of reward.
IMO it is all part of a primitive mechanism of social control.
The idea that we want to see beings we percieve as bad or evil punished is part and parcel of the whole psychology thus engendered in people. It may seem a bit off that a Hitler can escape punishment by suicide - but I think that is actually the case. If the idea of hell had never been invented, would we still see it the same way?

It seems to me anyway to be a contradiction in terms to have an alleged 'god of love' who torments people in an eternal hell.

I think that in the case of Hitler, we need to look at the roots of his anti-semitism - and it seems to me that those roots are in c/anity. Up to the 1960's the catholic mass contained the famous line about 'the perfidious jews'. So IMO Hitler was only continuing an established xtian tradition of persecution as regards his hatred of the jews.
We all know the attitude of the Vatican towards the Nazi's.

It may be a kind of comfort to some to beieve that evil people go to hell - but so are many other irrational beliefs.

An objective artificial intelligence might understand the human desire for vengance, but might well dismiss it as a case of emotion predominating over reason.

It seems that many facist dictators etc escape vengence - Polpot and Pinochet being recent examples. I can't somehow see that they are now languishing in some kind of medieval furnace. And if the xtian god were a reality, he shares so many things in common with then anyway that I'm sure he'd want them 'upstairs'.........

 

BlackBill

Yes.. the total idiocy of firmly believing a god of love created hell where
souls burn forever.
It is nearly beyond occams comprehension how supposedly rational people
can believe such. Maybe occam gives too much credit to the ratonal abillity of
many of his fellow beings. Maybe many more than he thought, a simply,,stupid.

As to the objectivity of an MI
Occam believes a Machine Inteligence would have to follow the same route we
biological critters do.
First awareness as a blank slate.. then learning everything step by step.
In the process a personality matures. This may take only months for an MI
compared to decades for us.
But still it is required for an evolved personality. [how else can you get one?]
What occam wants is to converse with a being without a reptile hindbrain.
One that is cortex only. Which , yes, should result in a far more rational being.
Without most of the emotion and ego of humans that dominates our world.

Time will tell

Occam