“Can AI have a soul?” — A conversation with a Christian monk

A journey to Caldey Island: from lavender scent to “void smell”

“Can AI have a soul?” a Christian monk sitting in front of me repeated my question. He’s been a monk for 15 years and a priest for another 25.

“That’s a deep philosophical and theological question,” he continued. He then paused for about a half a minute to think through it.

***

It was September 2024. I was in a Catholic monastery on Caldey Island — a small isle to the south of Wales, so small that you can walk across it in 15 minutes. The island is almost entirely owned by the monastery; the total population is 40, and seven of them are monks.

I had first come to this island a year before in search of a bottle of the best Lavender perfume in the world — the best according to Luca Turin, a perfume critic and neuroscientist.

The story of how I ended up hunting for this bottle of perfume is a bit convoluted. For the vast majority of my life and until 5 years ago I had a very poor sense of smell: at the age of three I fell off a bicycle and messed up the cartilage in my nose. 25 years later — 4 years ago now— I got corrective surgery. As a result, my sense of smell improved tenfold — this was like a new dimension of human experience finally coming online. I had some olfaction before, but you know that feeling when you call your friend over really shitty wifi and then the connection suddenly improves? That’s what regaining the sense of smell felt like.

Over the next four years I became increasingly interested in perfumes and scents. I got particularly obsessed with them after reading “Qualia Research Diary: Scents” by Andrés Gómez Emilsson, the Director of Qualia Research Institute. The diary ranged from descriptions of individual aroma chemicals to the claim that scent qualia is best viewed as two distinct types. It also discussed different lavenders being different.

I got fascinated by this claim and ordered like $250 worth of essential oils online — with 5 of the 30 or so bottles being lavender essential oils. Lavender is a fun smell, the ‘gin and tonic’ of scents: tart in a pleasant kind of way, herbaceous and meadow-y. A natural insect repellent bottled and processed for your enjoyment. Its backbone — 80% of its contents — are just two chemicals, linalool and linalyl acetate. Fun fact: Linalool also happens to be a mild sedative and dissociative. You cannot “K-hole” (or, rather, “L-hole”) on it as it has a ceiling dose, but it does get you a little “high” for a brief period of time, improving your mood for about half an hour.

And yes, all five lavenders were somewhat different. Even the linalool-to-linalyl-acetate ratio matters and varies across samples. And lavender also has a long tail of minor aroma chemicals. You know how stoners talk about each weed strain having a totally different and unique terpene profile? With lavender you have an opportunity to be just as annoying as stoners but without any weed involved, for better or worse. You can become as absurdly elitist as you wish. The world of lavender is your oyster.

So the monks on Caldey Island used to produce the best and the most well-rounded Lavender perfume (again, according to a perfume critic and a neuroscientist Luca Turin). Іt was unavailable anywhere online, but there was some chance that the shop on the actual island would sell me some. Thus I had to get to the island: it’s a five hours' ride from London and then one boat trip. Is traveling for half of a day from London worth some bottle of perfume produced by some random monks just because it smells mildly interesting in a slightly repelling way? Look, it’s not just about perfume. Sometimes a story needs a MacGuffin — an object that is necessary to the plot and to the motivation of the characters — but insignificant in itself. In Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield had a classical MacGuffin — a mysterious case shining golden light when someone opened it — we never saw what’s inside, but it did set a plot in motion that made for a fantastic movie. In “Big Lebowski” The Dude had to get back his rug (that really tied his room together) — and we never even learned if he’s even gotten it back in the end, and yet this mere rug is the key to the movie’s action-packed absurd plot.

It’s not a MacGuffin itself that matters but what happens to the story when you introduce one to it. How do you know your life story doesn’t need a MacGuffin? If you never went on a silly side quest to obtain some obscure item, then maybe your own life needs a mini Holy Grail of sorts to go after right now. Mine certainly did.

When I arrived on the island I learned that all of the Lavender perfume was sold out a few months before. Worse yet — later I learned from Luca Turin that they ineptly reformulated it at some point and it wasn’t the same anymore — I was chasing a ghost!

The shopkeeper told me the monastery had a guest house that was getting refurbished and would reopen in a year — these words planted the idea of staying there in my head. So a year later I came to Caldey Island again for a few days to stay in the newly refurbished guest house. This time I wanted just a few quiet days — and revisit the island, it had some sort of a spirit.

To everyone who stays at the guest house they offer a conversation with a monk — and of course I took up on this offer.

***

I asked people on twitter what they would ask a monk if they were me. There were a lot of excellent suggestions. Emmett Shear — some guy on twitter, the CEO of Softmax, an ex-CEO of Twitch and an ex-interim-CEO of OpenAI who lasted less than 72 hours — made a particularly great suggestion: “Could a digital intelligence be human — could it have a soul?”.

My conversation with the monk naturally went to the topic of current AI systems from the very beginning. When introducing myself I mentioned that I was studying AI safety and mechanistic interpretability, so he asked me a few questions on how AI works, its capabilities and privacy issues surrounding data collection. This set the perfect background to ask Emmet’s question. I phrased it slightly differently: “Can AI have a soul? Can it be human?”.

The conversation went for an hour, I took notes on paper throughout it. I will now summarise the conversation for you below. Since it's a summary, a compressed retelling of the main points, I am generally not using quotes (unless it's a true direct speech).

"Can AI have a soul?" The monk reiterated my question. He told me that in the Christian tradition there is a story — adding emphasis that it’s a story, perhaps implying that it’s a metaphor — there is a story of the creator taking a lump of clay, building a figure out of it, and then blowing the spirit into it through the nose.

Thus the soul in Christianity is divine breath. The soul is life and divine. It’s more than the human body. It’s related to the mind, but the mind is more complex than just the brain with its inner machinery involving electrical signaling. The soul is what makes it life. When a person dies — there is clearly more lost than just the body and its atoms — there is a loss of personality and vitality.

The monk reiterated my question again: “Can AI have a soul? Does it have a mind?”. And he continued. AI is currently very strong but also very limited. Human mind is also limited, but it has the possibility of creativity and thinking out of the box. This is not the case of AI. Here we went back and forth discussing current AI capabilities for a few minutes, and if I had to extrapolate the monk’s position to the current discourse I would say “AI has crystallized intelligence but it lacks fluid intelligence” — great at solving existing problems, not so great at solving novel problems in a creative and out-of-the-box way. The human mind is limited, but has capacity for longing for the infinite, which is God in Christianity.

Here I rephrased the original question as “Could AI have a soul if it keeps improving”? The monk segued into talking about soul as a general concept. Unlike some Eastern religions, the Christian view is that there is a single individual soul that starts at conception when gametes of the father and the mother merge — then grow inside a mother's womb. I proposed a thought experiment: would a human from a fully artificial womb have a soul? Every year more and more premature babies survive using more and more advanced incubators — a fully artificial womb is what happens when you push this process to its limit. The monk’s answer was that we still need gametes from the father and the mother even if the baby grows with the help of technology.

I asked if a dog has Buddha Nature if animals have souls and the monk replied “I don’t know. They might”. It was his fifth or sixth time saying “I don't know” in this conversation — and I really appreciated his humble willingness to say these words. I was also surprised to learn that animals having souls isn’t a settled question in Christianity. And I proposed another thought experiment related to AI: “We bred dogs from wolves but they are now quite different creatures” — we directed a process without understanding it, kind of like we do with AI that we “evolve” and “select” via gradient descent. The monk’s response was that it still takes a pair of chihuahuas to produce another one. It seems like the chain to the original creation matters here — though I didn't have time to clarify this.

The monk asked me: “Can AI have emotions?”. I answered that I tend to think it doesn’t have emotions, but at the very least it has “simulated emotions” — the AI has to model human emotions when predicting human writing in its training data. For example, AI has to have a model of what tends to make people happy, angry or sad in different contexts in order to successfully predict dialogues in fiction. The better this model the better you can predict text — a mere next-token-prediction-loss minimisation gives AI a model of human emotions.

The monk summarised his position: “Can AI have a soul? I don’t know. My gut feeling is no” — AI is too limited and doesn’t think outside of the box. It seemed to me that the question of capabilities was a key one here.

As our conversation drew to a close, he shared a Jewish legend. A guy takes a piece of clay, molds it in a human form and writes Emet (“truth”) on his forehead. The creature wakes up and the guy has to quickly remove the first letter to make the word “met” (“death”) so that the creature reverts back to lifelessness. I couldn’t help but think of nominative determinism: when a guy named Emmett Shear became a CEO of a thinking sand company OpenAI, he was quickly removed from his position — in less than 72 hours.

Ending the conversation, the monk said: “Thank you for the challenge. It was a very interesting question”. Thank you, Emmett Shear — I wouldn’t have asked this question without your reply.

On God, Christianity, seeing transcendent-in-the-immanent

A cat is a creature that was designed by evolution to catch prey. If you shine a red laser pointer near it, it starts to spin in circles trying to catch it.

A human is a creature that was designed by evolution to create tools and use them for various purposes. If you show it a vast and mysterious universe it resides in, its mind starts to spin in circles asking questions like: “Does the universe have a creator? What’s the purpose it was created for?”.

I think that a certain chunk of questions we wonder about god and spirituality are misspecified questions with a shape that is more of a reflection of the inner machinery of human minds than a reflection of the structure of the universe per se. Is there a point to even asking such questions? I think so: it’s strange that there is something rather than nothing and there is clearly something interesting going on about consciousness. But I also think it’s just fun to ponder these questions, even the most misspecified ones, like it’s fun for a cat to chase a laser pointer.

There is a view people take on Buddhism that it’s a religion that's trying to teach you about your experience rather than impart metaphysical assumptions into your mind. It’s a view with some validity to it, but Buddhism does come with certain metaphysical assumptions: e.g. samsara and reincarnation.

What about Christianity? During my five day long stay in Monastery I immersed myself in Christianity for a brief period. The opinion I formed of Christianity is fundamentally that of a guest, and not of a practitioner — so I hold it lightly. I talked to other guests, went to the church for a couple of services, and I also read “The Christian Contemplative Journey: essays on the path” — a book by a modern-day Christian mystic and a nun. I noticed that the volunteers in the monastery who were responsible for the guests did have the “void smell” — “a sense of embodied wisdom and grace and perspective which gives you the impression that the person is wearing a pair of glasses that lets them see the transcendent in the imminent”.

There is something interesting about Christianity and yet I got a sense that it has a lot of “philosophical tech debt” — a lot of pre-existing immutable core tenets and concepts: Trinity, individual souls, resurrection, revelations. Whatever Christians see is filtered through these beliefs. Now, this phenomenon isn’t unique to Christianity — every worldview is a filter, a lens that inevitably refracts the underlying reality. But Christian philosophy struck me as unusually fixed.

Roger Thisdell, a meditation teacher, once said to me: “Religion is esoteric technology for the mystic class”. Now, some people might think that thinking about religion as technology is sacrilege. But this blog is named ‘psychotechnology’ for a reason. Here we don’t take things for granted, we attempt to deconstruct and understand them.

With Buddhism we’ve gotten internet denizens all over the web and particular parts of twitter writing about it, trying to break down its web of confusing and contradictory claims and rebuilding it from the ground up step by step. Romeo Stevens with his blog is just one example of this (e.g. (mis)Translating the Buddha). I wonder if the same process is possible for Christianity? What would “refactored Christianity” look like? Is such a thing possible? Is Buddhism simply more bottom-up and thus easier to re-engineer? Christianity also has a contemplative tradition and a part of it is developing a personal relationship with god — but we ended up with ‘Mindfulness meditation’ (and not some Christian thing) as a part of Western psychotherapy. Why? Is this a matter of meditation being inherently more seculirasable? Finally, which parts of Christianity are accidental and which are critical to its functioning?

It feels dissatisfying to end an essay with a question in its title with even more questions. After visiting the island, I planned to research them — but here I am, nine months later, with this piece still sitting in my drafts unchanged. Time to admit I will not do this research in the foreseeable future.

Ending with questions instead of answers is dissatisfying — but then again, the cat chasing the laser pointer doesn’t get to catch it either.