It's vital to know that you have been conditioned to accept these systems without regard for their unprovable assumptions. Rationalists warn us against investing our hopes in childish things like God, the afterlife or the soul and then expect them to be true. But I don't think spirituality came about from wishful thinking. It came about because the world's sages, saints and seers managed to escape the limitations of the logical system that AI has put so much faith in. Think of a computer that can detect a million shades of red. If you ask it which one is the nicest, it has nothing to say.

The field of artificial intelligence has been a boom market almost from its beginning 60 years ago with the brilliant but doomed British mathematician Alan Turing. One branch of AI believes that a computer will one day duplicate how the human brain works, once the technical difficulties are worked out. Turing was more clever than that. He only asked that a computer's responses convince a thinking mind. The famous Turing test was the cyber equivalent of, "If it quacks like a duck, it is a duck."