[Tyler]

Religious Robots Revisited
     


A topic that's arisen here several times in the past is whether or
not future robots, assuming they achieve a level consciousness and
intelligence comparable to humans, would be capable of religious
beliefs. A new study, The
Neural Correlate of Religious and Nonreligious Belief (PDF format)
used fMRI
to compare the brains of fifteen
Christians with fifteen nonbelievers, shedding some empirical light on
brain differences in how they each evaluated the truth or falsity of
religious and non-religious propositions.
For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief
(judgments of “true” vs judgments of “false”) was associated with
greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important
for self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven
behavior. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed
statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about
ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that
religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern
emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking
about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.

Applying their findings to intelligent robots, it seems that while
consciousness and intelligence might be enough to practice religious
rituals, that emotion is key to evaluating the underlying
religious propositions. Emotion is already an important topic of
research in robotics, so these new findings should
keep the debate going over the eventual possibility of religious robots.
   

http://robots.net/article/2935.html