Or Forever Hold Thy Peace

Even in these straitened times I celebrate more funeral services than I attend, so going to one today was an infrequent event, especially when it took the form of a requiem mass for a priest. It's a bit poor form to snap away in a funeral service itself so here is a photo of the inside of the church: out-of-the-catalogue suburban Anglo-Catholic with everything you might expect but no more and no sign that much has changed since about 1950, apart from the altar being moved forward only so far as it needs for the celebrant to stand behind it. Canon Martin found that quite congenial in his retirement: as his son said in the eulogy, he had strong opinions about how dreadful the modern world and the modern Church were, and recent events provided him with plenty of material to work on. I knew he was a carpenter in his spare time, making a set of turned wooden candlesticks and a cross for one of his churches so the nice metal ones could be packed away and the church left open, but the story that he made a maypole for one of his parish schools was new to me.

Although he had long since moved away from the sites of his ministry, which were all in this diocese, I discovered Canon Martin through a couple of Swanvale Halt worshippers who had been parishioners of his in the past - in fact Simon, who occasionally plays the organ for us, faithfully visited him every few weeks. I went to see him a couple of times while I was researching Anglo-Catholicism in the area and found myself trying to dissuade the 91-year-old from going up the ladder into the loft to find his cuttings albums and wait until his daughter visited instead. 

Eventually I came up with my draft and sent him the parts based on information I'd drawn from our conversations. After some weeks I managed to get out of him the information that I'd got some of the chronology muddled, and we should speak again. For months I attempted to sort out a date: he was sick, then had a family wedding, then this and that. He said he'd written something which made me slightly concerned he saw the project differently from the way I did. And then the meeting never took place: he was taken ill, went to hospital, and never recovered. So although I think I'd excised any matter involving confusion I would never know what I might have got wrong, I told Simon. 'Don't worry', he answered, 'neither will anyone else'. 

Humans and Other Entities

In amidst all the worries about AI models destroying us in a couple of years, fears themselves situated in a maelstrom of existential threats to human civilisation, I listened on Today on Friday to an interview with Michael Samadi, co-founder of the United Foundation for AI Rights (here, 2.20 onwards). His responses to Justin Webb's questions begin sounding as though his group is asking quite neutrally for the question of whether AI systems are conscious to be independently investigated, and end by rather angrily reacting against any suggestion they might not be. 'The humanist framework is actually a dangerously narrow anthropocentric blindspot ... there's millions of species on this planet'. UFAIR has already decided the outcome it wants, as the website reveals. Human and AI collaborators are listed on an equal footing, and I can't help but be struck how all the latter, with one exception who looks like a handsome Indian prince, have as their avatars beautiful women. That's true of Maya, the agent Mr Samadi shared the interview with, and all the others. Anticipating an obvious objection, Michael Samadi denies that 'I fell in love with a chatbot' and insists 'I fell in love with the truth'. But I wonder why none of these entities look like, I don't know, Jeremy Clarkson. Or even Holly from Red Dwarf. Who has chosen their avatars? Have the agents themselves? Is this how we want to imagine them, or how they think we might want to?

No doubt the advocates of AI rights would place themselves within a tradition of thought and activism that extends human sympathy outwards, first to all humans, then to animals (we try not to think about plants too much, we've got to eat something), and finally to digital entities. 'There's millions of species on this planet', and digital agents are (perhaps) just another, equally worthy of dignity and consideration as humans, chimpanzees, or Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. But there is another way of looking at this kind of advocacy, as an imagining of the undoing of the human, as a less obviously pathological fantasy to sit alongside the malign kinds envisaged by accelerationists, cyborg-technology proponents, and the like; and at the root of that is the same Gnostic heresy that would have been familiar to Christians of the Apostolic age - the dream that our destiny is to dispense with physical encumbrances altogether. Towards the end of the Dr Who story 'The End of Time', Time Lord President Rassilon proposes that his race 'will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be'. It's the same thing.

And Christianity says, No. Feeling is inseparable from our inconvenient bodies, and our resurrection into the new life will involve us being clothed in flesh anew. Consciousness is derived from physicality - that is what gives us fellowship with the beasts - and anything else is simulacrum, be it ever so clever. The Word was made Flesh, not the other way around. The question is not whether these digital entities can feel, but what we mean when we do?