Policy scholar Dean W. Ball argues digital brain replicas can think but lack souls because ensoulment requires physical embodiment

“Thinking” really need not necessitate ensoulment. In my mind, and in my understanding of Catholic theology, the soul arises out of embodiment, not neural activity per se. If you made a perfect physical replica of my brain, kept that brain “alive,” and hooked it up to an interface, I am sure it would perform useful computations; it could play video games, write and read, etc. Ditto if you made a perfect digital replica of my brain and emulated it on a computer. It would “think”; it would still write like me, it would know my iPhone passcode, it would play my favorite video games and know my favorite spots to visit in them. But would that disembodied neural network be possessed of a soul? My distinct moral and spiritual intuition is no. And I would be disinclined to call that brain replica “me.” That doesn’t change the fact that there may exist other disembodied neural networks that will be “smarter” than most or all humans in cognitive domains over which humans have heretofore enjoyed the intellectual monopoly. And that is obviously going to happen, obviously going to shake the world, and obviously merits spiritual guidance from religious leaders. I think it’s fair to argue that Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular has already said a great deal about intrinsic human worth versus intellectual achievement. But my sense is that these teachings probably need translation for contemporary ears, at the very least, if not meaningful substantive updates (I will let the theologians be the judge). What I would say, however, is that, updated or not, these teachings did not really make their way into the encyclical, and if anything the encyclical implied there is no problem here at all. The machines can’t reason, so no threat to the human intellectual monopoly exists, the encyclical seems to argue. Instead, it suggests, the real problems relate to algorithmic bias, antitrust policy, labor market issues, and other sorts of technocratic areas of policymaking. You can agree or disagree with that to varying degrees, but the point is that *a lot* of people weigh in on those topics, and it isn’t clear to me that the world needs to hear from the Church that European technocrats need more status points, while American industrialists need fewer. Lots of people think that.