The Ontological Proof of the Existence of Artificial Gods

One of the great philosophical questions that has beguiled the discipline is the proof of God’s existence. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, the question has managed to captivate thinkers such as Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Don Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Baumgarten, Hegel and even the mathematician Kurt Gödel. However, as expected there have been plenty of variations of the proof and surprisingly some of the more sceptical minds include Aquinas, Hume, Kant and
Schopenhauer and perhaps the more obvious candidates of Frege and Russell. Some of these thinkers’ champion the casual,
cosmological or even moral arguments and in Hume and Russell’s case simply reject the idea out of hand. So how does the ontological proof of God’s existence aid us in these often rhetorical and perhaps circular debates around
the existence of divine and/or artificial minds? Much has been written about both philosophical problems, and this paper offers an overview of some of the main arguments. However, it does not seek to generate general equivalences between both positions. The paper merely seeks to explore the correlation between the notion of the proof of God and the pursuit of the proof of an artificial mind. The philosophical position leans heavily on the work of Kant as it is he who rejects the ontological argument for the existence of God (in favour of a moral one). The rejection forms part of Kant’s broader epistemology and it is his systematic formulation on human cognition that offers an interesting and comparative model to Turing’s later thought experiment. The intention is to highlight the definitional importance of terms around knowledge production an intelligence and the claims at the centre of Turing’s seminal paper and Kant’s broader philosophy. By appealing to Kant’s distinction between understanding and experience this paper foregrounds Kant’s conviction that ‘Understanding belongs to all experience and its possibility.’134 It is through the notion of the ‘achievement’ of experience determined through the synthesis of sensibility (intuitions) and the understanding (concepts) that are at the centre of Kant’s epistemological claims. The production of knowledge (dynamical) is not merely conceptual but fused to the sensibility that for Kant define the limits of what we can know. And yet the pursuit of the proof of the existence of an artificial mind bears all the hallmarks of a similar philosophical desire to prove the existence of a divine being. As shall be argued they are (as yet) limit cases in the Kantian sense. If such minds do exist, then perhaps we are condemned to never know of them before it is too late.