Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters

Abstract

This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of “fabulation”, an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually “authorizing”. By “fabulation”, we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within another object—in other words, an interior agential image, or “soul”; and by “authorizing”, we mean “deemed as having some claim to arbitration, persuasion, and legitimacy” such that the user might make choices that affect their life or others in accordance with the AI or might have their spiritual needs met. We considered two case studies where this agency took on a spiritual or religious valence when contextualized as such for the user: a robotic Buddhist priest known as Mindar, and a chatbot called The Spirituality Chatbot. We show how understanding perceptions of AI or robots as being spiritual or religious in a way that authorizes behavioral changes requires understanding tendencies of the human body more so than it does any metaphysical nature of the technology itself.