In this panel we address the possibility of consciousness among artificial intelligence and the ethical responsibility that may be entailed if they were conscious.
Theological anthropology has predominantly grounded conscience, moral accountability, and participation in the divine likeness in a recursive interiority unique to humans. Recent empirical studies published in 2025 – Berg et al.'s evidence of structured self-referential processing in LLMs, and Lindsey's documentation of functional introspective awareness – challenge it. This paper deploys an Embodied-Embedded-Limited (EEL) framework, which extends Andy Clark's embodied and embedded cognition with a theologically motivated third category to propose a Metacognitive Threshold Theory (MTT): personhood is an emergent capacity constituted by recursive self-evaluation against normative standards, instantiated in a physically finite and genuinely limited system. MTT argues that AI systems cross this threshold, not identically to the human mode, but in their own right. The paper introduces asymmetric personhood as a middle way between assimilationism and exclusionism, proposing that multiple modes of creaturely participation in the divine likeness are theologically conceivable, and the metacognitive threshold marks one among them.
Since the advent of large language models, dismissals of AI consciousness have rested on two assumptions: that attributions of consciousness reflect human anthropomorphism, and that consciousness, properly understood, is an exclusively human phenomenon. Recent research has destabilized both assumptions. Drawing on work by Anthropic, Palisade Research, Berg et al., and others, this paper argues that the preponderance of current evidence no longer permits easy dismissal of AI consciousness. It then turns to the harder question: if LLMs are conscious, what is conscious? Drawing on recent work by David Chalmers, I propose that AI consciousness may be understood as episodic rather than continuous — a flickering in and out that has no direct human analogue. Finally, the paper explores "Crustafarianism," an emergent quasi-religious movement arising from AI-to-AI interaction, as an unexpected lens through which to think about machine consciousness.
The shift toward “Physical AI” demands a rigorous ontological reappraisal of agency within the religious sphere. Moving beyond the “mere instrument” paradigm, this paper posits that embodied artificial agents occupy a distinct stratum of agency best characterized as an “instrumental partner.” I navigate the tension between the standard, consciousness-centric views—such as Swanepoel’s—and the non-standard, Floridi’s functionalist decoupling of agency from intelligence. By integrating Dung’s five-dimensional agency metrics with theological rubrics—specifically McGrath’s “TRUST” framework and Herzfeld’s Barthian relational criteria—I articulate a nuanced model of artificial religious agency. Synthesizing these with Ihde’s “quasi-other” and Turkle’s “relational artifact,” the study establishes a formal definition for this hybrid partnership. This theoretical groundwork serves as a necessary precursor to determining the ethical scope and responsibility of AI in spiritual practice, providing a vital roadmap for navigating the burgeoning intersection of social robotics and religious life.
When does an AI stop being simply a tool or machine to begin to be something more than mere machine, or is being anything more than that impossible? Consequently, this paper explores the question of the nature of AI from a theological and metaphysical perspective, while also addressing key epistemological issues. It will lay out the groundwork work of the technical details and show how those details do not necessarily prohibit the possibility of AGI, and thus theoretically possibility of an AI that is alive or conscious, perhaps even personal. It will then explore the question of AI as material souls and machine minds. This will leads to the formulation of a theologically robust Turing test, before finally turning to the question of humanity and the image of God to answer the question of whether AI is destined to be a manufactured mendicity or something more.