Thursday, February 16, 2023

The Capacity For Creation

The very first chapter of the Bible states that God created humankind in his own image, though it does not clarify the details of whatever that means.  If God is conscious, and humans are conscious, and one's own consciousness is one of the only self-evident truths there could be, then this at least is a significant similarity between God and his  human creations.  With consciousness comes the possibility of everything from introspection to emotional experience to relationships with other conscious beings, and, again, these would be major similarities between the Biblical deity and humans.  God and humanity can grasp the necessary truths of reason, have multifaceted components of their personalities, and desire companionship.  Both God and humanity also have the capacity to create.

Since the uncaused cause is the supreme creator, and on the Christian worldview, humans are gifted with the special status of bearing God's image--the only kind of being said to have this in the entire Bible--it is in one sense very natural that humans would also gravitate towards creation of their own.  Directly or indirectly, God is responsible for humans coming into existence with their own ability to create.  More than just a capacity, almost every individual person either has to create throughout their life just to complete practical tasks or will seek out the stimulation or self-expression of creation.  There are many reasons why someone might want to create, such as out of boredom, a longing for fame, or out of simple curiosity, but creation is far from a small part of human existence.

No one can create the necessary truths of logic, for they are fixed and could not have been any other way.  When either God or humans create, it is some physical or immaterial thing which is logically possible that is brought into being.  Even then, there are still so many possible ways to combine or reconfigure aspects of the natural world alone, just on this planet itself, that there are enough avenues of creation to last a person's entire lifetime without them having ever exhausted all of these potential creations.  Some of the existentially highest and increasingly relevant types of creative expression are art and artificial intelligence.  Each of these has become more prominent or developed due to benefitting from a series of previous technological creations, and there seem to be many more innovations on the horizon.

Regarding artificial intelligence, it is unknown if it is scientifically possible (it would at least be logically possible if scientific laws were different than they are now) to arrange a set of electronic parts so that they bring forth immaterial consciousness, and we could never know if this had occurred because a non-telepathic being can only see the outward actions of a machine.  It is impossible to know outward perceptions if a machine is truly conscious or just acting as if it is, like an inanimate wind-up toy.  However, if humans did succeed in creating artificial consciousness despite being incapable of knowing it, in turn, AI with the right physical frame for its consciousness to reside in would be capable on furthering the chain of creation: a machine, sentient or not, can invent and arrange material objects just as humans can. 

The triumphs of technology would have led to humans creating something in their own image with its own capacity to create, not unlike how the Bible describes God as fashioning humans in his image.  Creation can birth creation.  Even now, humans can experience their own creativity and realize due to reason and introspection how this kind of act can be an immensely potent expression of autonomy, individuality, emotion, and devotion to truth (people can create to honor abstract necessary truths about logical possibility, God's nature, or their own metaphysical status as individual persons).  Each specific act of creation reflects something of the uncaused cause's characteristics when it began the causal chain, as well as something of the human creator's nature as a human and an individual.

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