Questions Regarding Consciousness, Humanity, and Souls

Aprt of the problem I've been having the last few days is the things that I've been thinking about have been either not blogworthy or too complicated for me to blog about. These complex topics have included the concept of consciousness and what it means to be human. For example, if we built a robot with a computer brain exactly as complex as a human brain, and we programmed it to think like a human, would it be a "person"? If not, what is the trait that we have that it would lack? How can we define humanity? Is it an exclusively human trait, or is it possible for other creatures, perhaps even machines, to be "people," too?

Being religious, I get an easy answer to the question, but it's not one I'm fully satisfied with. The difference between us and the hypothetical "human" android is that we have souls, but that opens up other questions. Do animals have souls, for example? And if they did, would that make them people, too? If they don't, what happens to them when they die? Do they simply stop existing, as some non-religious people thing we do, or do they pass on to the other side, as we do? If animals have spirits that pass on to the afterlife, what's the difference between their consciousness and ours? Is there even a difference? They clearly are not human, but that could be as small a difference as a matter of species. Dogs are not humans in the same sense that they are not cats. There is a physical, biological difference, but there other differences, too. Animals don't seem to be as intelligent as humans, but that perspective could be a blend of human arrogance and our inability to measure animal intelligence.

We are certain that animals are not people, that there is something about us that is special that neither an animal nor a robotic replica of ourselves could have, but what is that defining characteristic? How can we be sure that all of us have it and none of them don't? Does such a characteristic even exist at all? I'm sure that robots don't, and could never, have souls, nor will they exist in the afterlife unless someone up there chooses to make more. But what of animals? They have spirits, don't they? What makes their spirits different from ours? What makes us so special? What is it that makes us human?

Anyhow, those are the questions I've been wrestling with lately. If you want to wrestle with them further yourself, you can talk to your religious friends, take a psychology and/or critical thinking class, and/or talk to anyone who has played The Talos Principle. Personally, though these questions trouble me somewhat, for now I think I'll be satisfied with saying that I don't know the answers to these questions, but eventually I'll have the opportunity to talk with Someone who definitely does. Until then, I'm going to try to treat animals decently and hope it doesn't matter too much that I have no intention to give up eating meat.