Can Computers Pray?

GreyyGuy writes "Found an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education linked on Wired about an artist who made a prayer circle of computers that recite prayers to one another...." Reminiscent of an old Arthur C. Clarke short story, The Nine Billion Names of God, in which a group of Tibetan monks who believe the purpose of the universe is to name God in all possible ways - and buy a computer to speed up the process. The British techs who install the machine are skeptical, but when the program finishes its run they look up at the sky - and see the stars going out, one by one.

Comments

What is prayer?

[Zach Frey]

What is prayer, anyway?

Well, many books could (and have) been written on this topic, but it's actually very simple: Prayer is communication. You can see this reflected in the English language itself, although it's become archaic: "prithee" is a contraction of "I pray thee."

Now, since we don't normally use the word "pray" anymore when we make requests of each other, "prayer" has come to have a slightly more restricted meaning: Prayer is communication with the Divine.

Well, what does communication require? This is really not that complicated, either. Communication requires two persons who are, well, communicating. So the question "Can computers pray?" really breaks down into two questions (as has already been noted): (1) Does God exist? and (2) Can a computer have personhood?

Question #1 is clearly a religious question, which has been around for centuries, and the mere fact of using computers to pose the question is not particularly interesting.

Question #2 is also not a novel one. Certainly, iMacs don't qualify as even remotely passing any sort of Turing test yet. And the question of personhood and strong AI is already a subject of vigorous debate, here on Slashdot and elsewhere.

Since iMacs are pretty clearly not sentient, the question of whether they are "praying" is simple: NOT! This is exactly the same as setting up a tape player on endless loop, and has exactly the same (non-)implications.

But let's look at this for what it really is: a work of art. Ms. Skeddle is apparantly some sort of artist, and "CyberRosary" is part of an art exhibit. Art is also about communication. What is Skeddle trying to communicate?

Well, based on her interview comments, her point is simple: "Catholic spirituality is empty noise, and consists of people robotically repeating words they don't understand."

Skeddle is a clever artist -- if she simply came out and said that in such a blunt fashion, it wouldn't be news -- it would simply be one more person bitter about a church, and attacking it. But since she uses computers, and tries to pose her "question" in the form of the future of spirituality and technology, she's managed to make her simple rant against the Catholic Church into "News for Nerds."

She's taking very little artistic risk here, as well, as she's "playing to the audience," given the anti-religious, anti-Christian, and especialy anti-Catholic bias of much of both the artistic world (where it's practically considered obligatory to at least tweak Christianity to be considered a "serious" artist) and of the computer world (where "creed-holding Christians are rare", according to the Jargon File).

The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
-- G. K. Chesterton, "G. F. Watts"

Joseph Campbell...

[LLatson]

This may be slightly off-topic, but it's something that I feel pretty deeply about, and I want to mention it.

For most of my life I've been an atheist. I was a mathematics major, now I'm in engineering graduate school, and somehow the concept of God as used by the established religions was something that I just couldn't reconcile with the lack of scientific proof (and even proof to the contrary, such as evolution).

I suspect that many of you out there feel the same way. But please please please let me suggest you read some of Joseph Campbell's work (The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers is an excellent place to start). Campbell's views on what religion really is, and who God really is have pretty much changed my life. I can now call myself a spiritual person, and yet I didn't need to make any leaps of faith or throw out any of my more scientific views.

In fact (maybe as a bonus to many of you out there who actively dislike organized religion), Campbell actually likes to point out why many religion's have the right ideas, but they try and concretize them, and they lose their meaning.

I wish I could communicate my ideas better, and this is neither the time or the place to get into a long discussion of this (maybe another /. article?).

Just read some Joseph Campbell.

LL

SPOILER!

[sumana]

Hey! I didn't expect, when I read the blurb on the front page of /., that there would be a spoiler for a perfectly good -- even classic -- SF story that I had meant to read someday. Unfair, I say.

It's standard convention -- as well as just plain common sense and kindness -- to put a "SPOILER ALERT" somewhere in front of said spoiler. I recognize that Roblimo was just tossing off an interesting tangential thought, and perhaps did not thinnk of it as a spoiler, but it was nevertheless. Please be mroe careful in the future.

On a somewhat related note, the guy who had the site about lightsabres (linked a day ago or so on /.) had the spoilers in a font color the same as the background, and directed you to highlight if and only if you wanted the spoilers. Not a bad idea for any of us who have that problem with our personal sites.

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You are all missing the point....

[Barcode]

Praying is not just words. In fact, prayers don't have to be words. I am fairly religious, and a lot of the times when I pray, I don't say anything at all. Just acknowledge Gods presence. And, I fell, that God is not looking for words or meaning or insight, he's looking for effort. The hospital experiment worked because God saw that people cared about the patients, because they took the time to pray for him. Thus, when a computer say "words" it's not a prayer. Thats like having a computer text-to-speech program recite a play. He's not an actor, he's a recording. And recordings don't have effort, thus, in prayer, computers can't do it either, because they aren't making effort, they aren't thinking about it, and God knows it, and will take that into consideration.