The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon (opens in new tab)

"One of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn't belong":

Carbon, silicon, meat.

But if you will insist on a false equivalency of silicon and meat, then there is still no double standard because meat finds itself existing, a priori, and ascribes to itself a soul given by a creator it cannot explain.

In the case of computers, meat is the creator, and meat must ask: at what point of the construction of a computer do we imbue it a soul?

If a soul is a natural property of silicon, then why no double standard about a beach or a glass bottle?

Never mind that the nature of computers is entirely stipulated, with no intelligible a priori properties. The soul is merely found, and therefore we have no need to explain at what point it is imbued to the meat.

As to the post hoc unintelligibility of the soul, however unsatisfying our lack of understanding, we find the question is integral to our nature as we have observed ourselves across all the generations of recorded history. The soul is the reserve of which gives rise to our questioning.

As AIs are crystalline impressions of our thoughts, with stochastic patterns of embedding and retrieval of our artifacts and therefore our behaviors, maybe the soul is transmitted to the computer via such embeddings?

But the distinction of the sovereignty of man over his creations versus his subservience to his creator must persist as long as our meat manifests our tools, but not vise-versa.

> We grant the human a “soul” because we cannot see the trillions of calculations happening in the dark of the skull. We deny the machine a soul simply because we can see the code. We are like children who think a puppet is alive until they see the strings, failing to see how we are just products of the strings of evolution.

Much like children grow up to understand that puppets aren't alive, we'll grow up to understand that LLMs aren't alive.

> ethics boards will strictly prohibit a scientist from testing or manipulating a petri dish of human neurons under certain painful or destructive conditions because of the “sanctity” of the biological material.

This doesn't seem to be true. The closest thing I've found is this paper that suggests maybe eventually we should consider discussing the ethical implications of playing with cerebral organoids: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-...

Consciousness & souls are defined by feelings.

Feelings need chemicals - dopamine, seratonin, oxytocin.

Our meat substrate has these, silcon doesn't.

While mirrors, TVs, Tiktoks, LLMs can evoke emotions in us, that's not sufficent to assign feelings, consciousness or souls to that substrate.

We must have been thinking the same thoughts over the past few days, I posted mine a few hours ago also. Your blog post went a different direction to mine but I went through all these same thoughts while writing it.

I hate how much I’m reflexively trying to find a "but" here, because "carbon nanrcissist" is a hell of an insult. It’s hard to swallow that we’re just first gen firmware being ported to better hardware, and my gut still wants to scream that there's a qualitative difference between a synaptic firing and a logic gate. But honestly, if I saw a person and an LLM output the exact same breakthrough, I’d call the human a visionary and the machine a statistical fluke, and I can't actually point to a mathematical reason why other than the fact that I’m made of meat and I want to feel special. We’re basically just the computers of 1935. But I disagree that my soul might is just high dimensional data compression that haven't been optimized yet