Author: Kate Levchuk / Source: Forbes
Intolerance, crusades, national differences, terrorism and interpersonal disagreements – all those to some extent resulted from conflicting religious views.
What about the lack of a religious belief? A major emergent trend of the last century came not from religious teachings but from the Scientific Enlightenment and hard data.
As of 2010, Christianity was by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31 percent) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth,” a Pew report says. “Islam was second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent of the global population.”
Scientific progress, and Internet and mobile coverage proliferation in the last 8 years alone might have decreased the numbers dramatically. Still not as much as to liquidate the spiritual beliefs of the vast majority of the world’s population.
So, the fact is this: technological progress as it is will take time and generations of change to convert the world’s population from monotheistic religions to transhumanism.
Why has religion settled so deeply in the minds of our compatriots? What has enabled us to elevate the individuality of the human soul and proclaim our dominance on Planet Earth?
The simple answer is – consciousness. Religious postulates state that while other creatures might have urges and emotions, only humans have this magic spark of “God’s breath.” The existence of consciousness is exactly what has given grounds to the ephemeral concept of the human soul as well as validated our right to shape the Planet to our liking.
One can argue against our exclusivity for consciousness, but the truth is we still cannot evaluate the presence of such in other sentient creatures.
What about machines? Can a machine think, feel or exhibit consciousness?
Turing, who is considered a Father of Artificial Intelligence, believed this question to be too meaningless to even deserve discussion.
We have been excited with the Turing Test since its inception, and the iconic status of “Blade Runner,” “Her” and “Ex-Machina” clearly suggest humanity’s fascination with the idea of machines exhibiting human level intelligence. The Turing Test, however, never intended to prove machines are as smart as human beings. It…
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