31.6 Self-aware artifacts?

According to theism, organisms or minds do not, strictly speaking, have either self-awareness or self-control. This is because a given discrete degree cannot be aware of itself, and any apparent self-awareness must have come by reflective awareness in a higher degree. We are not in control both of ourselves and of the manner of this controlling, since all life and love comes from God. This means that all (apparent) self-awareness comes from reflection in some prior degree and that all (apparent) self-control comes from love and wisdom operating together in some prior degree.

These considerations will have impacts on the kinds of artificial intelligence machines that some may wish to construct. We note, of course, that, strictly speaking, all minds and all machines are equally unable to be self-aware and self-controlled, since they are all systems within the theistic universe. What has to change, therefore, is the rhetoric which broadcasts the likelihood of self-managing devices. This fact is already obvious to some researchers, such Abel (2009) for example. He makes the correct stronger argument that physical dynamics “alone cannot organize itself into formally functional systems requiring algorithmic optimization, computational halting, and circuit integration."^31.1