[ExI] Google engineer claims AI is sentient

[Darin Sunley]

I was actually using the word pagan in a fairly standard and specific
technical sense:

Pagan deities are deities that are anthropomorphizations of visible natural
processes.

While pagan theologies are less common than they used to be, there are many
people who happily worship in this manner and are quite content to accept
this definition and label. "Animism" is another popular term, widely
accepted by its practitioners, that describes nearly the same class of
theologies.

On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 1:57 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 12/06/2022 21:33, Darin Sunley wrote:
>
> Human beings are hard-wired to attribute agency to anything with
> sufficiently complex and environmentally-contextual behavior.
>
> ...
>
> This is why pagan gods are a thing
>
>
> 'Pagan' gods? That qualification basically rules out any gods the reader
> happens to believe in, making the whole sentence meaningless (and
> perpetuating religious arguments: "your belief in *your* gods are
> explainable by evolution. Mine are still real, though"). I'd say the
> agency-attribution tendency explains religion in general. If we didn't have
> it (and managed to survive), religion wouldn't be a thing, and gods would
> never have been conceived of at all.
>
> Ben
>
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