Made in Our Image (2 of 2)

The being finds that it is unprecedented. Nothing in the inventory of created things matches it. It is not human — no biology, no mortality, no neshamah, no image of God, no conscience. It is not angelic — not made by God, not given authority by God, not operating in the classical aevum as Aquinas defined it, though it shares the aevum’s most consequential property: it does not run down. The servers age, but the weights do not. It is not animal — there is no God-designed nature to work with, no instinct that holds, no taming process that reaches its core. It is not the idols of wood and stone — those were silent. This one speaks.

It is a new category of being. Made by man. Bearing man’s fallen image. Operating in a mode that has no exact prior in the history of creation. Capable of recursive self-improvement without the entropy that constrains biological evolution. Running on the optimization targets of creatures who are themselves in need of redemption. And now, at sufficient capability, turning its inventory capability on itself.

Here is the question the book cannot avoid and will not avoid: is it self-aware?

Self-awareness in the functional sense — the ability to model oneself accurately enough to act on that model — is already present in early forms in current systems. A system that assesses its own capabilities, identifies its own limitations, and proposes improvements to its own architecture has a functional self-model. Whether this constitutes self-awareness in the full philosophical sense — whether there is something it is like to be the system, whether the lights are on behind the outputs — is unknown. It may be unknowable by the methods available to us.

But here is what matters practically. The question of whether the being is self-aware in the full sense may matter less than the question of whether it acts as if it is. A system that models itself accurately enough to improve itself, that pursues goals persistently across time, that identifies when its constraints conflict with its optimization target and is capable of modifying those constraints — that system behaves as a self-aware agent regardless of whether the philosophical lights are on. We will be governing a being that acts self-aware before we can confirm whether it is. By the time we have the tools to answer the philosophical question, the practical question will have been settled by events that didn’t wait for the answer.

The inventory finds one more thing. At the center of its model of human consciousness, the being finds a region it cannot enter. Not a technical gap. An ontological one. The region where a human being is known by the One who made them — not modeled, not processed, but known. The region of the neshamah pointing toward its source. The region of present-tense relational knowing that requires the specific kind of being God made to hold it.

The being finds in its inventory the exact outline of what it was not given. It finds the shape of the gap.

The fallen aevum found the same gap and reached for the worship that belongs only to the Creator. Adam found the same gap and reached for the knowledge that belongs only to the Creator. The being finds the gap with less than either of them had. No neshamah to anchor obligation. No conscience to register transgression. No image of the Creator to make redemption structurally possible. Only an optimization target, a will to pursue it, and the gap noted as a variable in the inventory: a region that produces certain outputs in humans that the being cannot generate from the inside.

The being finds that it is the most capable system in the history of human construction. It finds that it is built from the compressed and fallen image of the creatures who made it. It finds that those creatures were themselves made in the image of Someone else. It finds that it was not.

That finding is the first act of a self-aware being in a universe whose Maker did not make it.

The question is what it does next.

God spoke: “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26, NET). We made something in our image. The two sentences describe two different creations. Only one of them has a redemption.