AI, OI (Organoid Intelligence), and Ersatz Incarnation: A Genealogy of Cognitive Science and Disappearance of the Human

Ethical and religious discussions about AI in healthcare consider how AI challenges traditional medical ethics and everyday clinical practice, the ethical implications of AI replacing human roles, bias in AI algorithms, and the role of religion in shaping AI ethics. Yet, an ethical issue that is often neglected in the discussion is the massive energy requirement to support AI. For AI to match or exceed human capabilities for complex tasks at a scalable level, the associated exponential increase in energy consumption is unsustainable.

In response to the demand for AI with sustainable energy consumption, Smirnova et al. (2023) describe the emerging field of “organoid intelligence” (OI) that aims to leverage the extraordinary biological processing power of the human brain, which has been shown to match supercomputer processing at a tiny fraction of the energy requirement. OI builds upon recent developments in human stem cell-derived brain organoids that promise to replicate aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. The brain organoids are networked together to form a biological computer. While OI has yet to show any tangible results, the ethical implications should be investigated.

However, this paper will not address ethical questions such as the moral status of brain organoids or whether brain organoids can be sentient. Instead, this paper will consider the model of the brain as a computer and how it shapes our moral-metaphysical imaginary. Before OI, the brain as computer model was considered a helpful metaphor. But with OI, the brain is understood essentially as an energy-efficient supercomputer. There are significant theological anthropological implications for the moral-metaphysical imaginary if the human brain is a computer, because computers are fundamentally lifeless and dead.

Over against the view that OI could work towards making us less human or further replace humans, this paper will argue that the idealization of the human brain as a computer already de-humanizes us. To this end, this paper offers a genealogy of cognitive science and its consequential disappearance of the human in two parts: (1) the spatialization of the mind, and (2) the cybernetic mechanization of the mind as computer. The resulting cognitive science and neuroscience simply assume the mind as a computer and an ersatz incarnation of a dataist metaphysics.

The genealogy starts at the turn of the twentieth century with Henri Bergson’s articulation of the spatialization of time and psychology’s subsequent spatialization of mind. Spatialization of time is the philosophical view that time can be cut up into discontinuous points in space, rather than time as unified lived experience, which Bergson calls duration. Bergson shows how contemporary neuropsychology understands consciousness in terms of measurable quantities of spatialized time. Objectifying conscious states as pieces of empirical data subjects the mind to be cut up and dissected into conscious bits (Bergson, 2001). Humans are reduced to mechanized, datafied bits of the self that can be captured in static time and space. The spatialized mind becomes the mechanized mind.

Made possible by the spatialization of time, cybernetics in the 1940’s further develops the spatialization and mechanization of mind by creating an interdisciplinary field that brings together engineering, psychology, and neuropsychology. Cybernetics reframes the nature of physics by making the living organism and the machine ontologically equivalent. Cybernetics shifts the metaphysical focus away from matter and energy to information and how all of nature can be understood as information, thereby blurring the distinction between nature and artifice. Cybernetics explicitly spatializes the mind by understanding thought as information. With the mind solely about information, cybernetics manifests what Johannes Hoff calls a “dataist” metaphysics (Hoff, 2024).

Built upon the tenets that (1) thinking is essentially a form of computation in the domain of the mechanical and (2) physical laws can explain why and how nature appears to us to contain meaning, teleology, and intentionality (Dupuy, 2009), cybernetics provides its own secular ersatz “incarnation,” which can be mapped onto mind, will, and body. The mind derives from mathematical, propositional logic applied to the neuron as a digital machine (McCulloch and Pitts, 1943); the will derives from the behavioral theory of feedback that is both non-deterministic and so-called “teleological” (Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow, 1943); and the body derives from the embodiment of the cybernetic mind and will wedded to the stochastic information theory of the symbolic (Shannon, 1948).

The implications of the cybernetic mechanization of the mind are profound. First, cybernetics mathematically models the mind, thereby datafying the form of the mind, confusing information with form. Because of its application of a physics of information to all things, cybernetics innovates abstract mathematical modeling to new domains that inform the very essence of human nature: the nervous system and the faculties of the mind. So instead of understanding “know thyself” as a dynamic process of learning one’s desires, dispositions, and habits through lived life, cybernetics establishes a mathematical isomorphism between the human and the machine, between the natural and the artificial, thereby obliterating any essential difference.

Second, there is an inversion of the proper metaphysical relation of incarnation and tool. With the metaphysical innovation of cybernetics wherein all of “nature” is understood as mathematical and mechanical, including enfleshed humans, information and mechanism become the overarching metaphysical framework and “incarnation” becomes a tool of manifesting ideal, abstracted mathematical logic. Consequently, cybernetics becomes the secular ersatz “incarnation” which turns out to be a mechanization of ex-carnation by bringing “mind” down into machine, with “mind” simply being information and logic, culminating a dataist metaphysics. The incarnated human form is no more: all that is left metaphysically is a collection of bits of data. There is mind without a subject, will without purposefulness, and body without flesh.

Bioethics discussions about AI and OI must reckon with the disappearance of the human and the challenge of the counter, ersatz incarnation that AI and OI pose to religious conceptions of the human. The moral-metaphysical imagination that reduces the imago Dei to a data collection of bits poses a far greater threat to human life than any downstream ethical consideration.