Academics often say that humans do not have souls, that our minds are only the physical matter of our brains. This is called physicalism or the physicalist theory of mind.

Anchored in the physicalist theory of mind, the artificial intelligence movement has been able to raise billions, and even trillions, of dollars to try to recreate the human mind in computers. The thinking is that, if the mind is a computation of the brain, they should be able to replicate the brain’s computations in silicon. Little do they realize, they are blowing themselves up with their own bomb. Let me explain.

Their very premise contradicts the idea that humans do not have souls. In fact, artificial intelligence proves the opposite. It proves that humans do have immaterial souls. To understand why, we must understand what artificial intelligence is.

What “artificial” intelligence really is

Artificial intelligence is mathematics and logic. In particular, the sophisticated neural networks that are all the rage today are gigantic linear algebra formulas with billions of variables.

Just imagine yourself back in junior high math class where you learned to solve 4 + x = 7. A chatbot like ChatGPT is merely filling in a billion x’s with numbers, and then using those numbers to look up letters. So, as you can see, artificial intelligence is just junior high mathematics that has ballooned to gigantic proportions like the marshmallow man in Ghostbusters.

The clincher is that mathematics is not material, yet artificial intelligence proponents believe the mathematics of their neural networks is the seat of consciousness. Hence, the logical conclusion from what they believe is that the seat of consciousness is immaterial. In other words, the high priests of AI have rediscovered the age old belief in the transcendent soul. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

We can lay this all out in formal logic.

Premise 1: the mind is a program that runs on the brain’s hardware
Premise 2: the mind is the source of consciousness

Conclusion 1: the source of consciousness is a program

Premise 3: programs are immaterial logic

Conclusion 2: the source of consciousness is immaterial

Picture software running on a computer. The AI-ists — as we’ll call them — believe that the mind is software that runs on the brain. Yet your copy of the Windows operating system, which is actual software, doesn’t care which computer it runs on. Regardless of the computer, it is the same operating system.

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Now, this fact would be beside the point if AI-ists believed that there is something special about the computer that makes Windows what it is. But they don’t. They believe it will run on any Windows-compatible computer.

Recall that the AI-ists also think that the secret to the human mind lies entirely in the software, which is entirely information and not matter. They think that the right concoction of information will generate consciousness, regardless of the material mechanism the concoction runs upon.

This is why, if we apply logic to the AI-ists’ beliefs, we should conclude the human mind is an immaterial soul. Yet it was precisely the premise that the mind is reducible to the physical matter of the brain that started them on their merry journey in the first place — a premise which they end up contradicting.

The physicalist theory of mind is intended as a bomb that blows up traditional religious belief in the immaterial soul. But, following that theory to its own logical conclusion results in — belief in the immaterial soul. Thus, the physicalist theory of mind blows itself up.

You may also wish to read: Why the theory that the brain is like a computer is wrong ( Eric Holloway) The pattern we see in artificial intelligence progress is that the movement towards emulating the human mind is also a movement away from the brain. The success of AI shows that to whatever extent the mind operates like a computer, such a mind cannot be running on the hardware of the brain.