A week ago, I set the stage for my next several posts by engaging with a lecture by Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan on the topic “Ethics, AI, and Human Flourishing.” During that lecture she introduces a framework for thinking about AI in the context of Christian values and virtue ethics that goes by the acronym “DELTA,” ans described in the following short video:
Last Thursday I focused on the first letter in the DELTA acronym:“D” is for Dignity. Today’s letter: “E” is for Embodiment.
Consider a simple definition of a “human being” that I raised at the beginning of Thursday’s post: “A human being is a physical thing plus something more.” Many people, including the vast majority of my students over the years, immediately resonate positively with this definition–it matches our intuition that there must be something more going on with human beings than just being physical stuff. Such intuitions, however, can cause us to pay too little attention to a fundamental fact: our bodies matter.
With respect to AI, the role of the body in what it means to be human is crucially important. If what matters most about us is our intelligence, and if–as dualistic tradition tells us–our non-physical soul (our “something more”) is entirely responsible for what makes us unique, then it is reasonable to wonder whether our reason/intelligence/soul “software” could be played on more kinds of “hardware” than our physical bodies. If what matters is productivity, problem solving, and intelligence–could an AI system at some point be considered as “intelligent” or even as a human person? That depends on whether human beings are more than minds/souls riding around in a physical container. It depends one whether our bodies play an important role in being fully human.
The older I get, the less patience I have with philosophical and theological frameworks that split body and soul/mind apart (usually with an appropriate degrading of the value of the body). There is no such dualistic split in the gospels, but the influence of Greek philosophy (which often did make such a split) on the development of early Christian thought unfortunately saddled traditional Christianity with a tendency to ignore the basic seminal truth of the Christian faith: God became human, which means that God embraces physicality.
It is clear from the gospels that Jesus cared a great deal about human beings as physical creatures. The immaterial soul plays no role in the gospels–it is an influential “add on” in early Christian doctrine under the influence of ancient Greek philosophers (particularly Plato). God honors the human body so much that God chose to take on a human body; God continues to choose physical human beings as the way in which the divine interacts with the physical world. Which raises the question of what difference would it make if we considered our bodies to be loved by God?
One of the books I took with me the most recent time I went on retreat was An Altar in the World, my favorite of Barbara Brown Taylor’s many fine books. The book is organized into chapters by various daily human activities that, with a certain amount of attention and focus, can be turned into spiritual practices. One of my favorite chapters is “The Practice of Wearing Skin,” subtitled “Incarnation.” Taylor argues that although many, perhaps most, of us have learned not to embrace our physicality and, depending on how we were raised, even to be suspicious of the role that our bodies might play in our lives as spiritual creatures and persons of faith, the heart of the Christian faith is rooted not in the soul, but in the body.
“Here we sit, with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body,” Taylor writes. She adds that the “practice of wearing skin is so obvious that almost no one engages it as spiritual practice, yet here is a place to begin: with tears, aches, moans, gooseflesh, heat.” John’s gospel tells us that, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Barbara Brown Taylor comments that “This leaves us in the peculiar position of being followers of the Word Made Flesh who neglect our own flesh or—worse—who treat our bodies with shame and scorn.”
I grew up in the same religious world that Barbara Brown Taylor comes from and, like her, was never told in church that my body is good, or that God takes delight in our bodies. But the resurrected Jesus had a body with the marks of death still on it, a body that could be prodded, poked, and still needed to be fed. A body that he took with him back to heaven. God trusted carnality to bring divine love into the world, and God still does. This is worth remembering.
Instead of looking past the physical and ordinary for what is spiritual or profound, we should remember the most profound truth of Christianity. God became flesh, became mundane, became embodied in the world that God created. And this incarnational activity continues in us. We are God’s hands and feet—hands and feet that are physical stuff. It may be that an increased focus on our carnality as God in the world is exactly what our age needs. Barbara Brown Taylor writes that:
The last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies.
What does this have to do with AI? If the totality of the human person is uniquely and intricately connected to our embodiment, if our intelligence/psychological/spiritual “software” can only be played on our biological and physical “hardware,” then AI by definition cannot replicate what it means to be human even if it can produce intelligent output far more quickly and efficiently than we humans do. Those who claim to be followers of Jesus need to remember that the incarnation ends up with a body hanging on a cross. God in the flesh resists being spiritualized, but instead comes to us in the embodied sacraments of bread, wine, water, and human beings.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In