>>99734839Firstly if you were trying to start a discussion about the spiritual aspect of consciousness (or if those things are separated), asking if I'd let an artificial consciousness join a religion is a pretty fucking retarded way to start that dialog.
Both the soul, and consciousness are elements of the internal experience. As much as I can't prove that you, or my dog don't have consciousness, I can't prove that you or my dog have a soul. So the discussion is pretty fucking pointless. It's just as easy to make the claim about other people. Even if we had some sort of "soul measuring device" that allows us to weed beings "without souls" out, I don't think it would be a productive or meaningful enterprise; it's not really damaging anyone or hurting anything if we allowed beings without souls to take part it religious ceremony, since there's more benefit from it than merely the spiritual aspect. Things like community, relationships, and culture take a part in it too. It's really not your place to judge how a being (soulless or otherwise) interacts with their world, as long as they're not making it worse.
That's all kind of besides the point though since we still don't have a way of detecting these qualities in any entity, artificially intelligent or not. The closest heuristic we have for whether or not an entity may have a spirit is whether or not the entity shows some form of intelligence or consciousness. AI, in its current form exhibits several properties that we would usually correlate with entities that have souls, but since we can't validate that for anything, it's unfair to invalidate AI simply because you have rigid ideas of what constitutes as consciousness or having a spirit. In short: if AI has all the properties of something with a mind, the burden of proof is on you to show that it doesn't have a mind, because we don't have a formalism for qualifying such a thing.
Now, if you can do that, then you're good.
