DH - Meta-Soul

Current date/time: 3/6/2025 12:10 AM
"Can AI truly possess a unique soul, or is individuality merely emergent from interactions and data?"

I think a true soul is a cumulative fingerprint that requires a minimum thresholds to fully activate.

To be clear, there's a few ways to think about this question. If we want to play pure semantics, then ANY cognitive thing that comes into being has a unique soul, if for no other reason than the combination of physical hardware and mind-software is divergent even in the event of identical twins.

So it's easy to imagine that even a mass-produced robot, with a sentiment AI loaded up off a standardized image, is still unique because everything from the circuit board soldering to the different MAC address by definition creates differences.

But the reason why this isn't satisfactory ENOUGH for my taste is that I don't think a unique soul really "kicks in" until you can self-actualize, think, reason, strategize, form long term memories, and form an identity.

And I don't believe that this attribution can be "granted" by a 3rd party source either, just because they happen to be awake.  For example, I'm not entirely sold that a 3 week old infant has a very unique or coherent "soul", so much that it's primarily operating on "auto pilot", driven by its limbic system, just like any other mechanistic creations. But that won't stop Mom from calling her baby a "precious soul" in anticipation of a healthy build up.

So that's where my gut-check is at. Yes, AI can possess a meta-soul, but we need to account for some of the same milestones towards really having one that that human's must also achieve.
- DH