If the metaphysical foundations of our society tell us we have no soul, how on earth are we going to imbue soul into AI? Four hundred years after Descartes and Hobbs, our scientific methods and cultural stories are still heavily influenced by their ideas.

He began a process that would move past merely separating mind and matter, and toward a worldview that saw only matter as real. A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, went further and suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical processes happening in the brain. In doing so, Vervaeke points out, he was laying the ground for artificial intelligence:…what Hobbes is doing is killing the human soul! And of course that’s going to exacerbate the cultural narcissism, because if we no longer have souls, then finding our uniqueness and our true self, the self that we’re going to be true to, becomes extremely paradoxical and problematic. If you don’t have a soul, what is it to be true to your true self? And what is it that makes you utterly unique and special from the rest of the purposeless, meaningless cosmos?

John Aubrey tells us that Hobbes ‘always carried a note booke in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke, or otherwise he might have lost it. He had drawn the designe of the book into chapters, etc., so he knew whereabout it would come in.’

leviathan

Charles Darwin wrote an entire book about humans being social creatures. He wrote that any Hobbesian human would be an “unnatural monster.”

Hobbes’s position tends to be favoured bythose on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau’s by thoseleaning left

This school in effect applies a Hobbesian view of politics to international relations, and assumes that aggression and insecurity are universal characteristics of human societies rather than the product of specific historical circumstances.