re: "The Return of the Magicians"

re: "The Return of the Magicians" (The New York Times, March 2, 2023) 

AI already pushes us to reflect on our own sentience and more, but this is nothing new. We have known with exponentially increasing certainty since the rise of science that whatever goes on in brains to generate minds and all the wondrous aspects of being a (human) person that that entails follow strictly from physics. It would be foolish to try to explain our consciousness in terms of the movements of elementary particles and forces, but they remain the foundation of everything we and the rest of the cosmos is, including perhaps a multitude of universes. 

Our traditional failure to explain such things as consciousness gave rise to belief in afterlives and a spirit essence that possesses our material being to control it.  Descartes could not escape such notions. They remain as false as that murky notion called free will. 

That we are now evolving machines that promise to replicate, in strict accord with fully determined processes we cannot comprehend, what we think most miraculous about ourselves is a timely reminder that talk of souls and the like is pure, unsubstantiated kook enabled only by our failure to understand how such things truly work. But then, that "God of the gaps" has ever been the first and the last refuge of religions and like supernatural wishing for us to be more than we are. 

Let us pray that the advancing AI brings forth a miracle akin to Darwin's theory that delivered us from any need for supernatural explanations for the bounty of manifest biology.  

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/opinion/magic-science-ufo-ai.html#commentsContainer&permid=123533541:123533541