Wittgenstein on AI and Religious Belief

In sections 359 and 360 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein forcefully rejects the idea that a machine can think, arguing that our use of ‘to think’ only allows us to meaningfully say that a human being thinks. Wittgenstein compares this to the nonsense involved in saying that a machine is in pain given that ‘to be in pain’ is solely a human phenomenon. AI has evolved greatly over the last decades and the current debate is not so much about whether a machine can really think but rather on its personhood. After all, we seem to be able to create machines endowed with quasi-human abilities. Max Braun’s recent experiment “1922 Wittgenstein Meets 2022 A.I.” made it possible for a machine to continue writing the Tractatus, which would then feature a series of candidates for a proposition 8 such as “What the world is and what it is not can only be determined by God”. The question then arises as to the nature of AI-generated religious beliefs. I shall explore various discussions in the Nachlass about why it does not make sense to credit machines with the capacity to think and shall show that ‘to believe in God’ is a better analogy to explain why there are specific human phenomena.