Botology: AI from the Philosophical and Theological Perspectives

Abstract

What are bots based on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? This question is not a shallow one. It refers to various problems and has great importance. As I will also argue below, we should constantly and methodically answer this question, in order to develop what I decided to call “botology.” This volume contains articles which provide different aspects of the discussion on what such bots and AI are, from the two perspectives, which are probably the most general: the philosophical and the theological one. In this way it is an important step towards the project of philosophical and theological botology. Robots (machines which perform actions automatically) and bots (virtual machines, which perform different tasks, but not as physical entities) are designed as our partners.  Those which use Large Language Models (LLMs), especially LLM-based chatbots, are not just nonhuman actors according to the actor-network theory (Law 1992). They accompany us, they talk with us, they do many things for us, they even guide us, which also includes philosophical and spiritual guidance. In this way, they co-create our life in a deep sense, as they operate on the level which used to be specific for humans: even if one says they do not think and do not decide, they process information in a way that they help us in thinking and decision making, and often they do it for us – instead of us. One could argue that in order to examine them, we do not need any new branch of philosophy or theology with specific methodology. We already have a framework which is useful for this purpose. It is philosophical anthropology (cf. Darowski 2014). With respect to aspects in which they are similar to us, we could apply to them the same questions which refer to us. We can ask: who are they? What is the purpose and meaning of their life? Do they have anything like mind and what is its ontological status? However, even if we can ask the same or similar questions, we are dealing with a radically different being. Many important differences between bots and humans will be discussed in some of the papers included in this volume. There are also others, which I find crucial. I will just mention a few of them, in a nutshell. First of all, LLM-based bots and robots with similar performance are not humans. They just assimilate us. Second, despite the fact that they are created “in our similitude,” as an imago hominis, there is a crucial ontological difference between us and them. We are a product of (at least) nature. In the theological perspective, we would also add: we are creatures of God, whereas in the philosophical one: the question is open, and we remain a puzzle. Whereas bots are, at least nowadays, our creatures: the product of humans. Third, there is a great difference between human nature and bots nature as such. The question about human nature is the basic question of philosophical anthropology. Even if we follow Jean-Paul Sartre and adopt that our essence is not ready when we start to exist (see Sartre [1946] 1960, p. 28), even if there are various possible scenarios for human enhancement and human augmentation (Vukov 2023; UK MOD 2021), not to be confused with transhumanism (cf. García-Barranquero and Alonso Fernández 2025; Rakkolaien 2026), there are certain capacities and limitations which are set up for us as natural beings. In this way human nature is stable. Bots using large models (including LLMs) are in a radically different situation. Some of them can be created in the way that they do not have a fixed internal structure, as they can be constantly developed or can develop themselves, far more than we can expect and in a way which is hard to predict. It would be enough for a bot to change its own meta prompts, or launch a re-training, or create new paths of interactions between the models and the sources of information it utilizes as its own parts. In my opinion, such capacities are sufficient to speak about a flexible nature. To sum up, we are dealing with something which assimilates us. In order to better understand it, we could use the tools of anthropology. However, at the same time it is radically different, so the methods of investigation should also be different. For this reason, we need new branches in philosophy and theology, which will investigate the nature, the relationships and the role in the world of: 1) bots, especially those based on LLMs and other models, connected together in an “intelligent” system, as well as 2) robots which use such systems. The key part of such bots and robots are these systems, which are the main characteristic of intelligent bots. So, although we do not rule out robots, it is appropriate that the name of such branches would refer to bots. In this light, I find appropriate to offer the label “botology.” This term was used as a label of a small project described as “the study of social bots,” whose results are presented on a website (https://botology.tumblr.com/). I propose to enrich its meaning and develop botology within philosophy and theology as, respectively: philosophical botology and theological botology. We should emphasise that many important steps towards botology understood in this way have already been taken in the form of valuable conferences and publications. There is no place here to enumerate them. Our task would be to elaborate methodological principles of botology and bring such results together in a methodical manner.