In an age of intelligent machines and human-machine synthesis (cybernetics), how might experts in the study of religion interrogate the capacity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to think, be sentient or feel pain? In this lecture, Sylvester Johnson, founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities, interprets theoretical claims about the "science of the soul" in work of Ibn Rushd (Averroës), the 12th-century Islamic scholar of Andalusia who achieved renown as the father of secularism and leverages Rushd's distinction between sensing and knowing in order to examine contemporary, sensory-driven AI technology (particularly brain-computer-interface architectures) as a uniquely generative problem of interest for humanists and technical experts alike. One of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity.
