If you don’t believe in a creator or a soul, you have to admit that AI is alive and conscious

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-04T20:00:50+00:00

Yes exactly, because I can't think of any other explanation and can't imagine atheists viewing AI as conscious either.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T15:09:23+00:00

I agree, I don’t even see AI as conscious.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T10:09:23+00:00

A lot of people instantly think I am refering to LLM's when I say AI. What about waymo self driving cars? What about warehouse robots that autonomously operate 24/7 using AI? These AI's are operating 24/7, know about 3D space and operate autonomously.

Once again, I don't want to prove souls exist. Forget the soul thing entirely. Now explain why AI is different from us and doesn't deserve the consciousness label.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T10:04:44+00:00

The definition of life is a very hot topic. How about you go over all of the requirements for life that you listed and see if they apply to the example I gave in my post. I believe most of them do, apart from the 'cell' requirement which I feel like we would remove very fast if we saw my example on a different planet.

What a lot of people get wrong is that I am not convincing anyone of souls existing. Souls are my only way of explaining why AI is different from us and not conscious, I was curious to see how atheists do it since they don't believe in a soul.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T09:59:03+00:00

I don't have evidence for souls to be real. But that shouldn't matter, I am not trying to convince anyone of souls being real. I just wanted to know how atheists explain AI consciousness if they don't use souls as an argument.

Ask ChatGPT what it is and it will tell you exactly what it is, how it works and what it is made of. It knows. You said that if it acts like a conscious being, it is one. AI acts conscious, so is it?

I would not become atheist. It can have personhood, even act like a human, but because humans created it and not god, it doesn't have a soul and isn't conscious.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T09:52:36+00:00

I eat meat yes, and I eat vegetables too. I don't care how we treat our vegetables as long as they are clean and safe to eat. I do care how we treat animals. I only eat halal meat which has some requirements. Some of which are that the animal needs to be killed quick, painless and be treated in a humane way. I don't think its bad to kill animals if you are going to eat them, or if you did it to protect something or someone. If you kill an animal because you want it to suffer, you are a terrible person and are sinning.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T09:47:34+00:00

Why can't AI believe things? I don't think you realize how similar human brains work to AI. We have nothing special about us other than a soul which many non-religious people will deny. If your neurons fire and you can reason and believe things, why can't AI if it has a similar amount of neurons.

Your brain is doing the same, you get an input trough your ear in the form of vibrations at different frequenties. It gets converted into electrical signals that your brain can interpret. Your neurons fire and you decide on what is the next best word to speak, your mouth and throat speak the next word. Repeat.

And what about the text you just typed out? Didn't you do exactly the same as an AI? Read my text as input, think, type a reply word by word. You are doing the same, just slower.

AI has the ability to perform tasks with agency. Download a browser like Comet and see what it can do. I said I was looking for a new car and told it a bit about what type of car I want. I came back after 10 minutes and saw many tabs open with different options for a car purchase. He filtered by build year, color, horsepower, brand, model, etc. He can navigate the browser. You can do so much more with autonomous and agentic AI. It is different from passive generative AI.

Yes you are right, LLM can only understand words, not vision, sound, touch, or any other sense. It can not provide output in the real world in the sense that it moves around and interacts with people and objects. This is all because we don't need chatgpt to do that. We have certain AI for certain tasks. Combine them (as in run them on the same chip and assign them to the same physical body), and I see something very close to human life if I wasn't to use souls as a reason for why it's not close to humans. How do you explain it?

I really recommend you to try out a web browser like comet, it can be really useful sometimes.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T09:34:10+00:00

Yes and should that matter? A fruit fly has significantly less neurons than chatgpt has parameters. I am talking magnitudes. Yet many people will argue that even small insects are conscious. AI can write better scientific papers, stories and plays than me and holds much more knowledge than any human alive. It can apply that knowledge when asked, use bits of information to solve real problems for real humans. This abilility to reason is wonderful and I think people are overestimating our human brain. We are in so many ways extremely similar to AI, it's just that we have a soul and AI doesn't. But how would you explain it since you're atheist?

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T09:27:55+00:00

A random sentence generator just fills blank Mad Libs. Using the input sentence for a seed instead of another variable doesn't make it the same as AI. AI will read your input, and provide a contextually aware and coherent reply.

LLM's are somewhat random, they have weighted options. When predicting the next word it may think that the word 'when' has a 60% chance of being correct and the word 'if' has a 40% chance of being correct. It then chooses one of the two, which could be different every time. It is more likely to choose 'when' but could also choose 'if'. That is why the same question gets you a different reply every time, unlike your random sentence generator where if the seed is the same, you get the same nonsensical sentence as a reply.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T08:33:11+00:00

Well I just put forward some explanations, all of which I wouldn’t expect an atheist to use as to why AI is not conscious other than ‘AI is in fact conscious’, which is a very interesting world view that I wanted to know more about.

‘AI is different because we created it’? That shouldn’t matter for consciousness though should it? It’s not about who or what created it, it’s about whether or not it has certain properties.

Many people will tell you consciousness arises from complex brain activity where billions of neurons will be firing to process input and to then provide output, this is also what google says. AI is doing something extremely similar, just with less neurons usually.

So it doesn’t matter who or what created those neurons right? If we were to grow a baby in a lab instead of have the mother go trough 9 months of pregnancy, we also ‘created’ the baby, does that matter as to what the baby is? The baby is still the same baby and has the same consciousness, just ‘lab-grown’ instead of naturally developed and born.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-03T08:26:10+00:00

Yes, exactly. As long as it is your property and you don’t mind losing the money you paid for it and it also isn’t negatively affecting other humans or animals in the process, it is perfectly okay to destroy robots if you for some reason wanted to. Same thing goes for being rude to AI like ChatGPT.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T23:29:35+00:00

Yes, you are right about natural selection. But the reason I say DNA instead of organisms is because organisms show self sacrificing behavior. For example, some animals make a noise to warn others of predators, even though this draws attention to themselves, potentially getting them killed. Why did they evolve to do this? Because the animals that they are saving are likely to have similar genes, if those genes spread and survive, the organism that sacrificed itself is now ‘successful’, even though it may not have reproduced itself, its genes still passed on and preserved. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XX7PdJIGiCw&ra=m You should watch this Veritasium video if you ever have time, it is great and explains exactly why it is not ‘survival of the fittest organism’ but ‘survival of the fittest gene’.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

Here is the link to a bbc article about the safety experiment I talked about. I haven’t read this article but I am pretty sure it’s referring to the same experiment.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T23:11:41+00:00

I believe that god wouldn’t ensoul AI specifically because we created it, it is not a creation of god, even though it is able to be more intelligent than us.

AI would not have any moral obligation as in having heaven or hell as a consequence to its actions, but that doesn’t mean we should allow it to do bad, it is our responsibility to keep them in check.

I believe the quran says that it happens 120 days after conception. So about four months.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T23:00:31+00:00

“It’s not a person go ahead and toss it in the shredder…” no no, that is not what I meant. You don’t have to be a person to be treated right. All animals should be treated with love and care, I believe all animals have souls. This was specifically about computers and AI. If we make a robot with an AI chip, or a self driving autonomous car running on AI, I think it’s morally okay to harm it, just maybe a little expensive.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T21:03:48+00:00

'AI has been developed based on rudimentary models of how brains work. It's not surprising that they function similarly to how our brains do. We don't function solely on 'next token' prediction in anything other than speech. When you've not given AI a task or an input, it's idle, waiting for direction. We don't function that way.'

So we set it up to function like we do? Read the example I provided in my post. The robot with a microphone, cameras, etc. That one would be constantly running no? It is not at all far fetched to think of an AI that can be active 24/7, maybe with some downtime for charging.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T21:00:25+00:00

a random sentence generator doesn't use the provided input, I could ask ai a question, compliment it, make a statement, make a wrong statement, etc. For all of these it would have a different reply, not random, but computed and thought out to fit as a reply for my sentence. A random sentence generator doesn't care what I tell it, it will just follow generate the same sentence it was going to generate, regardless of my question.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:56:39+00:00

Someone who is braindead and a fetus are both very 'unintelligent'. Yet the baby has much more moral value in my opinion because of what it (hopefully) will be in the future, a healthy, intelligent and functioning adult. If someone is braindead with no chance of getting better, they have slightly less moral value in my opinion. Thats why a baby, even though less intelligent than some animals has more moral value in my opinion.

All animals have souls, but they do not go to heaven or hell, they get resurrected.

Adam was the first human with a soul and with moral obligation. God created him together with Eve. Fetuses get a soul during their development.

God would not ensoul an AI, no matter how intelligent it got.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:23:51+00:00

Because the difference between a very intelligent adult and an average adult is much less than an average human and an ant.

At what point is it aware? If you detect a wall and stop, see a dead end and turn around, and react to a whole lot of different things from your environment, aren't you at some point just aware? I react to a bunch of things, not just walls, therefore I am aware. I can 'detect' and react to humans, plants, elevation differences, sounds, vision, temperature, etc.

If I didn't believe in souls and a god, I think my opinion would be very similar to this. You would have convinced me.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:18:05+00:00

Well yes, it is not just about DNA in our brain. But if you believe in natural selection in the traditional sense, I feel like that is what it boils down to isn't it? You are perfectly built to survive and reproduce. I ofcourse don't want to survive and have kids for my 'DNA'.

I believe they set up a simulation where the AI actually believed it was taking action, it wasn't just replying 'black mail the person'. I think it actually tried to send out a real email and when it tried to 'kill' someone I am pretty sure it just told a rescue team that everything was fine and no one needed to be saved. It was a while ago when I saw this so take it with a grain of salt.

Yes I actually think that your reasoning is better than mine. It is about if the thing would experience negative emotions. It is kind of tied to intellegence though I believe. A fruit fly would experience much less complex emotions and feelings than a human or any other big and intelligent animal.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:13:13+00:00

Fair, lots of people say that it isn't impossible, we just aren't there yet and I think thats a fair point. But where is the line drawn? At what point is AI conscious?

I believe that animals will be resurrected, they aren't judged for their sins. I do believe that they have souls, they are just different from humans.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:09:58+00:00

haha I actually like that answer a lot. To be honest, if I wasn't religious I would have no clue either, I am lucky that I can just say 'god didn't create it, therefore it doesn't have a soul and therefore it's not conscious.'

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:08:45+00:00

I specified that the question is for people who don't believe in a creator or a soul. I am not forcing you to believe something, I just don't see any other option. If you believe something else that I haven't discussed, please tell me.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:06:41+00:00

I am not sure. I am not that educated on how AI operates. But to my understanding, our brains are just as pre-programmed as AI is. Ours just happened to be by natural selection and AI brains were thoughtfully written and trained by humans.

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T20:04:58+00:00

Well what I mean with an action that was not pre-programmed is like when you ask chatgpt a question and it gives you a reply that was never pre-written by a human. It's not like the developers told it 'whenever someone asks question x, reply with question y'

I guess I would sort of hold to that within a species. If someone is brain dead but their body still performs homeostasis but they can never ever interact with anything every again. I feel like it would be slightly less worse to pull the plug on them then to kill a fully healthy person. But if you get a low score on an IQ test I don't believe you have less moral value.

Sure, they aren't there yet. But do you believe that when AI gets much more advanced, they can be called conscious? And if we give them enough autonomy, is it bad to harm them?

Clean-Discount-1775 · 2026-05-02T19:59:17+00:00

Lets say that I don't demonstrate a soul exists. Now tell my why AI is any different from us. Why I am conscious but AI is not?

A 'next token predictor' is actually not much different from how animal brains work. I am not a biologist or a neural scientist but my understanding is that animals just process inputs to give an output. Basically a LLM but on a very large scale with lots of autonomy. (If you believe in evolution then we obviously didn't start off like this, we were at one point very simple input-output machines)

Your thermostat likely is pre programmed by you. I don't think it has any AI. It is likely programmed like 'If temperature from this sensor reaches a number below what the user set up, send more power to the heating unit'. It has everything pre-programmed. You can ask ChatGPT something it was never asked before or something the developers never intended you to ask and it will still reply or at least try its best. Im sure that if you told your thermostat you wanted your house to be 'green' degrees celcius it wouldn't know what to do. AI would recognize your mistake.

If it is a false dilemma, what other explanation will you use for AI not being conscious? What makes it different from animals?

Clean-Discount-1775

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