Can robots have souls?

Kansei is a robot designed to look as closely human as possible. He is in constant movement and reacts emotionally to certain triggers. Apparently he responds to the word war with disgust, quivering his lip. He smiles at the word ‘love’ and so on. According to some those that have been working closely with him have ended up imbuing him with a soul. They genuinely believe that he has developed/ adopted something a little ‘other’ than he was programmed to do. Is Kansei’s soul a reality? Why do humans seem to desire to form relationships with a mechanistic objects? People name their cars for example and assume they have a personality.

The notion of inanimate objects having a soul is not so unusual in Japan. The Shinto faith blurs the boundaries between the animate and inanimate. Shintoism holds that rocks, trees, and by extension robots, are imbued with a spirit or soul in just the same way as people are. When a new robot is brought into operation in some factories a Shinto ritual is performed and the robots are treated as if they are new members of staff.

Mitsubishi is currently developing Wakamaru, named after an ancient samuri. It recognizes faces and can talk after making eye contact. There are tales, although how believable they are is to be questioned, that an elderly woman who was dying of heart disease, had formed such a close bond with her Wakumaru that she wanted to have it at her funeral. Her dying wish was granted.

Even if this story turns out to be an urban myth, it has developed with little skepticism in Japan. This demonstrates, if nothing else, that the notion is not entirely unbelievable.

In light of all this one is forced to ask - If something has the pretense of a self, and thus a soul, is this the same as actually having one? How can we judge? Is a robot capable of experiencing a sense of ‘I’?