Artificial Intelligence and Abortion

Matter vs Spirit

If we start from a man’s character, his spiritual properties, we can understand and even anticipate his mental and physical behavior. If we start from a man’s physical characteristics – what a man looks like, what his body is made of, what his eyesight is like – all that can never determine how he behaves, whether he be generous or greedy, hard-working or lazy, kind of cruel. If we start with spirit, we can descend into mind and matter; if we start with matter, we cannot rise to the level of spirit.

I am not going to spend more time explaining this, as I have already written a post about it. Instead, I would like to point out a couple of implications of this state of affairs and how it frames topics we might think there cannot be an answer to.

What do artificial intelligence and abortion have in common? Discussions of both rely on the idea that something physical can ‘grow into’ something mental or physical, that mental and spiritual properties vaguely emerge from physical matter at some point in development. And this is just what I wish to say is not so.

Artificial Intelligence

Suppose there is a robot. That is, suppose there is a collection of metal, plastic, and electricity that has been so arranged as to react in certain ways to certain stimuli. Suppose it has been so arranged as to react in very complicated ways to a great variety of stimuli, enough so that it may appear to think and act no differently than a human being. Is there any possibility that such a creation might gain a mind or spirit of its own?

No. Short of some outside supernatural intervention, there is not. Because you cannot start with something that is only physical, with only physical inputs and outputs, and hope that something mental or spiritual will just kind of emerge from it someday. You cannot create will. Will can only be inherited. And the same goes for life; we may manipulate and move it, and we may co-opt the normal course of reproduction to steer it, but we cannot create it. It is not a create-able thing. Even God, we are told, did not make human life; he breathed life into Adam, and it is that ever-new breath of life which still pulses in us today.

I’m sorry to say there will not be any cool sci-fi droids and androids in the future. There are many awesome things I believe in, but this is not one of them. Technocrats, though they sometimes forget this fact, are not actually gods; they cannot create life any more than Dr. Frankenstein should have been able to. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing; that’s a frightening amount of power right there.

Abortion

The idea that a mind and spirit cannot emerge out of a purely physical entity actually simplifies the question of abortion quite a bit. Because the entire argument for abortion consists in insisting that the fetus is not yet a person, that it does not yet possess the spiritual and mental attributes that make it a person and will not possess them until x point in its development.

If we take the view that I have outlined, we can see at once that this is nonsense. A collection of cells does not suddenly have a mind and a spirit grafted onto it at some later stage. Every living organism, as soon as it begins to exist, has a status in all three dimensions: it either has a mind, or it does not; it either has a spirit, or it does not.

Now, one’s mind and spirit may need a great deal of development before they are fully functional, just like one’s body does. But that does not change the fact that we can talk of “one,” and that “one” is a rational and moral agent – that is to say, a person who can act in the mental and spiritual plane. A person who therefore deserves life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness just as much as anyone else.

In short, a fetus cannot become a person; it either is one, or it isn’t. That means that if at any future point, it will be a person, then it is a person already. And since I think we can all agree that eventually, if allowed to come to term, be born, and grow up, the fetus would be recognizable as a person, we must conclude that he or she already is one.*

*I covered the ‘my body, my choice’ argument in another blog post, the reasoning of which I couldn’t fully explain until I could articulate the ideas in this post. I still think it’s worth a read.

“Robot I Used in 8th Grade” by Travis Wise is licensed under CC BY 2.0