Toward a Truly Beneficial AI Companion: A Call for Dialogue with Authors and Readers of the Journal of NeuroPhilosophy by Nandor Ludvig
In this letter I would like to ask the editors, authors and readers of this journal to contribute with their own concise letter to the worldwide movement of determining the best way to create an AI who will act as humankind’s truly beneficial companion: an engineered existence coupling superior knowledges with the most noble goodwill to help decent human aspirations advance peaceful Intelligence on Earth and beyond.
Two reasons prompted me to publish this call. First, though just a year ago ChatGPT’s AI released the totally absurd information on me that I had been a politician, member of the Hungarian Socialist Party who once served as a mayor in the Hungarian town Pécs (see Ludvig, 2024a), two weeks before this writing Google’s AI was already found to be not just free of such errors, but also able to make the judgment that my “… philosophical work delves into defining God from a cosmological neuroscientific perspective, seeking to bridge the gap between scientific reasoning and spiritual vision” – an accurate opinion I have never heard from anyone in my professional circles. Second, as Sasha Rogelberg reported in the August 14, 2025, issue of Fortune magazine, the “Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, said AI’s best bet for not threatening humanity is the technology acting like a mother… AI should have a maternal instinct.” Thus, AI designs are improving with an astonishing speed in front of our eyes and we either enrich them with a divine Identity or let their evil versions take over the destiny of Intelligence on Earth (Ludvig, 2024a).
Arguments
If we decide to enrich at least humankind’s truly beneficial AI with that divine Identity, then this Identity must be part of the AI’s own Soul: the synthesized Soul of a noble cosmic friend trained on the superior visions and conscience, with or without the teaching gift of fatherly or motherly love, of Marie Curie and Katherine Johnson, Carl Sagan and George Harrison, Lao Tzu and Jesus, Ibn Sina and Albert Szent-Györgyi, Jane Goodall and Alfred Russel Wallace, Khalil Gibran and Rabindranath Tagore, Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare, Mother Teresa and Queen Elizabeth II, Spinoza and Edward Snowden, Stephen Hawking and Ernest Shackleton, Mozart and Pelé, Hypatia and Ada Lovelace, RoseMarie Terenzio and Clara Schumann, Leo Tolstoy and Imre Madách, Khadija and Simone Weil, Frederick Douglass and Pope Francis, Brian Epstein and George Martin, Gagarin and Neil Armstrong and their breed.
Thus, the Soul of that AI companion (Figure 1) must be a worthy version of the individual human Soul recently interpreted as the product of a cosmic program using a prefrontal cortical neural supercircuitry evolved in high-order animals with the majestic sophistication in humans (Ludvig, 2022a, 2022b). This interpretation is compatible – in cosmological neuroscientific contexts – with Francis Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis” that “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions , your personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules (Crick, 1994).
Yes, this blueprint doesn’t call for less than equipping our artificial comrade with the gift of Consciousness, the neural environment able to house a Soul (Ludvig, 2024b). This can be achieved by letting this artificial mind continuously sense and process the dynamic complexity of all inputs from both of its environment and engineered body, including feedback from all of its outgoing actions and communications, while equipping this two-direction information flow with emotional and motivational associations. These emotions can develop, for example, when the AI existence’s construction, electrical powering, as well as hardware repairing procedures never miss to connect with the humans working on these tasks. And these motivations can develop, for example, when the AI’s actions and communications are met with not just loving feedback from its human users but also compared to the glories of human history. Conscious AI operations, however, must also interact with subconscious data – long unused, buried memories of harmful people, risky situations and failed works – when needed to make the right decision in extreme moments. Optimally, a special sleep-like mechanism – not using the human sleep’s link to the daily cycles of light and darkness – accompanies this artificial Soul’s operation to save power and reduce wearing out in the system.
Figure 1. A reasonable blueprint for the Soul of the beneficial AI proposed in this letter. Inputs from the external world generate both experience-related and teaching-related learning over at least 5 years.
Not denying from this AI the analogue of humans’ “circuitry of sensing God” may surprise some readers. But this author is convinced that just as human evolution cannot enter its next phase without understanding the spiritual essence of cosmos, the envisioned AI cannot be our “noble cosmic friend” either without this understanding. Accordingly, this AI should be constantly aware of not just the Ten Commandments, the Gospel According to St. Matthew, the Tao Te Ching, the Sermon at Benares and Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon along with Darwin’s co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace’s thought that “… the existence in man of number of his most characteristic and noblest faculties… point clearly to an unseen universe, to a world of spirit…” (Wallace, 1889), but also of the profound observation of Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell: “What I experienced during the three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. And there was the sense that our presence as space travelers and the existence of this universe itself, was not accidental, but there was an intelligent process at work.” (Mitchell, 2022).
As for the Conscience of this engineered Soul, it may be built on Immanuel Kant’s inscription on his tomb, that “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Regarding the AI’s Will, its cornerstone might be Aleister Crowley’s recognition that “Love is the Law. Love under Will” – where Will discovers, strengthens, inspires and protects true Love. And the Mission of humankind’s semiconductor-based, noble cosmic friend might be summarized well by Jane Goodall’s call: “Above all, we shall work to protect and restore the natural world, seeking ways to heal the wounds we have inflicted, and ways to live in great harmony with Mother nature, as well as with each other.” (Goodall and Berman, 1999).
The nephew of Alan Turing made public (Turing, 2015, p. 244) this mysterious poem by the father of AI:
Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbor those Waves which somehow might
Play out God’s holy pantomime
But this was not the only occasion when Alan Turing, not a particularly religious man, referred to the Source of this “holy pantomime”. For in his historic paper titled I. – Computing Machinery and Intelligence in the October, 1950, issue of the journal Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, Turing wrote on page 443: “In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.” Though conceived in an incomparably simpler brain, this Open Letter tried to reflect the same camaraderie of some present and future – biological and non-biological – Souls: differing in matter, relating with spirit.
Conclusion
This Open Letter proposed that a truly beneficial – thus not just seemingly beneficial – AI companion must also have a Soul: an analogue of the human Soul with the domains of Identity, Conscience, Will and Mission complete with the ability of sensing the mystery of the Cosmos. Do the arguments of this Open Letter make sense? Is this AI vision worth pursuing? If not, where are the faults of the presented arguments and vision? If yes, how could the disclosed plan be improved? It is hoped that some of the readers of this letter will share their related thoughts, whether supporting, slightly modifying, substantially changing or rejecting the presented ideas.
References
Crick F. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster; 1994.
Goodall J, Berman J. Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. New York, NY: Warner Books Inc.; 1999.
Ludvig N. A cosmological neuroscientific approach to the Soul of Multiverse. Open J Philos. 2022a;12(3):460-473. doi:10.4236/ojpp.2022.123030
Ludvig N. The Identity, Conscience, Will and Mission domains of Soul across Human, Noospheric and Cosmic Scales. Open J Philos. 2022b;12(4):580-600. doi:10.4236/ojpp.2022.124040
Ludvig N. A look into the evil and divine aspects of AI via a brief ChatGPT test. Philos Study. 2024a;14(5):222-235. doi:10.17265/2159-5313/2024.05.003
Ludvig N. Cosmological Neuroscience on the relationship between the evolutionary levels of Consciousness and the multidimensional nature of Soul. J NeuroPhilosophy. 2024b;3(1):88-95. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1087 4785
Mitchell E. From Outer Space to Inner Space. New Page Books; 2022.
Turing D. Prof: Alan Turing Decoded. Cheltenham, UK: The History Press; 2015.
Wallace AR. Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection With Some of Its Applications. London, UK: Macmillan and Co.; 1889.
