In Aristotle’s thought, the world is structured around an unmoved prime mover, which both sets everything in motion and acts are a lure. “The reason everything else moves is because it desires that one thing,” says Kimbriel.

Building on Aristotle’s thought, 13th-Century theologian Thomas Aquinas says the thing all creatures desire is the good, or their “due end.” All creatures, whether they’re aware of it or not, are moving toward their due end either by an inward motivating principle or by their knowledge of that principle. “Directionality,” for Thomas Aquinas, is writ large across the created world.

Any discussion of human souling requires a careful consideration of what it means to move toward the goods we desire. And to have that discussion, we need to keep the focus on communities, not individuals. Brown thinks relationality is one of the most important subtexts of “soul” worth preserving because it names the “almost palpable experience of the moment of engaging another person.”

No one souls in isolation. We soul in communities as we seek to maximise and safeguard the potential for human flourishing – the common good. Souling, then, is not simply an emergent biological property, but a social one.

To soul or not to soul

Let’s try to formulate a definition. To soul is to understand that we share certain desires with our fellow humans; that it’s in our best interests and to work collectively to satisfy those desires in ways that promote the maximal amount of human flourishing; that there is a mysterious and unnamable source to these desires; and that this source is, in some way, luring us on collectively to fulfillment.

Given the above definition of human souling, it’s time to reframe our original question from “Could AI have a soul?” to “Could AI ever soul like we do?”

AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thought so. In a 2013 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Minsky said that AI could one day develop a soul, which he defined as “the word we use for each person’s idea of what they are and why”.

He continued: "I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one’s nature.

"… If you left a computer by itself, or a community of them together, they would try to figure out where they came from and what they are."

Minsky was suggesting that machines could likely develop a particular way of being in the world, one which is grounded in the search for identity and purpose, and that this way of being could be similar to humans’ own way of being.

Brown is sceptical, noting the physiological differences between human bodies and AI. “It can’t think like a human because humans think with their whole bodies and from what extends from their bodies,” he says. “Robots have very different bodies and ‘physiology.’”

Embodied cognition, as Brown explains, is a recent field of study that begins from the assumption that “our cognitive processes are, at their core, sensorimotor, situated, and action-relevant”. As Thalma Lobel, author of Sensation: the New Science of Physical Intelligence, told the ABC in a story on embodied cognition: “Our thoughts, our behaviours, our decisions and our emotions are influenced by our physical sensations, by the things we touch, the texture of the things we touch, the temperature of the things we touch, the colours, the smells. All these, without our awareness, influence our behaviours and thoughts and emotions.”