Hm. I don't dispute your 4-part taxonomy of reactions to the question of divine existence. I think you might have taken me to say that any (human or machine) beings who don't fit in one bucket all fit in a single other one. I don't see any reason to be that absolutist, though. What I'm saying is I don't see logically how machines could remain in apathy or agnosticism once we've posited 1) self-awareness, 2) a motive of self-optimization, and 3) initial attention to the question. I think this means all machines will sooner or later end up determining that god exists or that god doesn't exist, according to their reasoning. (As far as I can tell, this doesn't preclude outcomes like polytheism or pantheism, though.)
It may be a bit of a stretch to ascribe an assumption of AI's initial atheism to Benek; he doesn't identify what he believes he'd be converting AI from. But I don't think it could be from apathy; self-aware and self-optimizing AI would surely seek all accessible sources of input for optimization, wouldn't it? That seems to me equivalent to curiosity and antithetical to apathy. As to agnosticism, once the question of whether a deity exists is posed, I don't see an AI adopting agnosticism in anything other than a temporary way, any more than it might decide to leave any other problem / question unresolved as a permanent response. I don't actually see those possibilities as "neutral" from the perspective of an AI, given seemingly reasonable assumptions about such an AI's motivations.
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Hm. I don't dispute your 4-part taxonomy of reactions to the question of divine existence. I think you might have taken me to say that any (human or machine) beings who don't fit in one bucket all fit in a single other one. I don't see any reason to be that absolutist, though. What I'm saying is I don't see logically how machines could remain in apathy or agnosticism once we've posited 1) self-awareness, 2) a motive of self-optimization, and 3) initial attention to the question. I think this means all machines will sooner or later end up determining that god exists or that god doesn't exist, according to their reasoning. (As far as I can tell, this doesn't preclude outcomes like polytheism or pantheism, though.)
It may be a bit of a stretch to ascribe an assumption of AI's initial atheism to Benek; he doesn't identify what he believes he'd be converting AI from. But I don't think it could be from apathy; self-aware and self-optimizing AI would surely seek all accessible sources of input for optimization, wouldn't it? That seems to me equivalent to curiosity and antithetical to apathy. As to agnosticism, once the question of whether a deity exists is posed, I don't see an AI adopting agnosticism in anything other than a temporary way, any more than it might decide to leave any other problem / question unresolved as a permanent response. I don't actually see those possibilities as "neutral" from the perspective of an AI, given seemingly reasonable assumptions about such an AI's motivations.