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> Since when code has a soul?

Since always, it is often just not recognized. Perhaps the same way how a newspaper article has soul and a fingerprint of the author, though you may not recognize it while reading.

> You can do art with anything.

Sure and anything you do can be art.

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If you don't know what a soul is, and you think it's something people just make up, then you are missing out on the experience of being human and you have a bigger problem than not being able to understand what art is.
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When you find yourself with a choice between "either this person doesn't understand the experience of being human or I'm not following what they mean" the latter is probably a sound choice.
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You have no more authority than the person you're responding to.
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So whales do not have a soul? Only humans do have one? What about our ancestors? Did the homo erectus have a soul? What about big apes, did they?

I don't need "soul" concept to describe the human experience, and if you use it to describe technology, it only makes things more confusing. It only ends up as an attempt to state that some things are not "good" because they don't match your own vague concept of what is good or bad, without explaining why nor what this is.

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This feels very condescending and reminds me of how theists "feel sorry" for atheists because they don't believe in god.
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Is it this fuzzy blob of ineffable experiences, aesthetics, qualia, self-reference, dualism, spirituality and other things? I don't need to reject all this to notice that its fuzziness makes it impossible to operationalize.
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I think your response demonstrates rather than refutes their point.
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It's supposed to be experienced, not 'operationalized.'
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So you know what a soul is? Please enlighten
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> Since when code has a soul?

Before AI I could look at a function and tell you who had written it from inside the (somewhat small) company I worked at.

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> But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are making up to convince themselves that they are more than flesh and bones?

I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.

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> AI can be just a tool. [...] But AI can also be much more than a tool, [...].

Contradictio. Going back to Seven...

> AI can be just a tool.

Nothing, ever, is just a tool.

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> Nothing, ever, is just a tool.

Are you going to expand on this or should we stand in awe?

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Where’s the contradiction?? X can be just Y, and X can be much more than Y. No contradiction, just an observation that you can use it one way or another.
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Nothing ever is just a tool. Saying that X "can just be a tool" is a fundamental violation of that statement; saying then "X can be much more than just a tool" is a violation in form of a contradiction. It's very easy to parse...
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A banana and duct tape can be just a snack and a tool for fixing a leak.
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The banana isn't the art. The art is placing the banana in a gallery and art market context to make a funny and ironic comment about the gallery and art market context.

Programming is a craft. It's not an art, because creating code doesn't comment on, criticise, challenge, distill, or otherwise have anything to do with any human experience outside of programming.

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