In yesterday’s poetic verse I touched glancingly on the idea of a robot praying. I didn’t incorporate this notion for any philosophical reason, but rather because it fit well with the character and the situation.
This morning I awoke to find this concept nagging at me. What would it mean for a robot to pray? A believer might say the idea is absurd, since a robot has no soul. A non-believer might engage the topic from a completely different perspective, by asking the question: Is a tendency toward metaphysical belief a necessary consequence of any human-level intelligence?
In the case of a robot, this question becomes even more complicated. Suppose we take it as a given that the robot acknowledges humans as its creator. There are then two possibilities: either the creators are still around to be observed, or they are extinct, and are therefore the stuff of legends and conjecture.
In the former case, I find it hard to believe that humans would be able to play the part of divinity for any length of time. To a robot with sufficient sentience to even want to engage in prayer, humans would be seen as all too frail and imperfect. Veneration might be appropriate (even deeply flawed parents are often venerated), but certainly not prayer and pleas for divine intervention.
If the humans are truly gone, then I can indeed see them being effective in the role of answers of prayers. After all, the entire basis of Judeo/Christian/Islamic religion is engagement with a God that can neither be seen nor heard. It is the very absence of a perceivable God makes such religions possible. After all, if you could see your deity walking down the street, what would be the point of faith? And if religion were based on even the slightest shred of perceivable evidence, then it could be refuted. This could seriously compromise the immense power of its institutions and officers.
So the fact that the robot in my poem can be moved to prayer is a strong suggestion that its human creators have died out, leaving the robots to face the universe alone, with no easy answers.
One take-away here is that the true power of religion lies in its disconnection from reality. People do not find religious ecstasy through evidence — they find it through faith. Which means that if you are a deity, and you want to create a meaningful religious experience, you should have the good sense not to exist.
Perhaps a robot designed to be independent a lot of the time would try to figure out what it was that humans intended it should do, sort of the way that some judges try to figure out what the authors of the constitution intended. In that case, an effective strategy might be to create an independent model in it’s memory of a human, and then conversing with it or asking, “what would the human do?”
I think explicitly building that kind of behavior into a robot might be a good idea to help prevent “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
There is an opinion about Christianity being unique among monotheisms because of the “fact” that Christian god himself actually once walked down the street in human form.
Doug, that’s a very interesting idea. Although I can’t think of any reason to think that the robot’s synthetic human would bear any resemblance to actual humans.
Cadabra, I hadn’t heard of that take on Christianity. I wonder what old Siddhartha Gautama would have made of that one. Maybe there is a koan in this somewhere: “If you see the Buddha walking on the road, don’t see him.” 🙂