AI is forcing us to reckon with a 400-year-old problem

The modern fantasy novel His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman features magical objects, such as the subtle knife which can create a portal to alternate universes. The opening of this portal leads to a wound in reality which bleeds, releasing sinister, invisible creatures. Early modern Europeans took magic seriously and intertwined it with mathematics, science, and religion, considering all these disciplines under the umbrella of philosophy.

David Chalmers, a philosopher, wrote that philosophy serves as an incubator for other disciplines. During the 17th century, the growing knowledge of the physical world created pressure on magic and religion to provide explanations for life, the mind, and matter. French philosopher René Descartes introduced his "mechanical philosophy" to address this metaphysical crisis by cutting science free from spiritual constraints, suggesting that investigations could explain inanimate world, plant and animal behavior without the need for supernatural forces.

This left only human beings with rational souls, aligning with Church doctrine. Descartes proposed that the rational soul should control a central, undivided structure in the brain, the pineal gland, which led to the creation of homunculi, little men pulling the strings of our actions. Alternatively, one could accept dualism and consider the mind as immaterial (a ghost in the machine) or eliminate ghosts and homunculi, resulting in philosophical zombies - entities that behave like humans but lack conscious experience.

Although Descartes believed in the human soul due to religious faith and the inability to imagine how mechanical cause and effect could enable open-ended problem-solving, his mechanical philosophy paved the way for Newton's physics and Lavoisier's chemistry, making biology possible and setting the stage for later scientific advancements.