Can AI ever be truly conscious?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Can AI ever be truly conscious?". Your opponent's style: Sam Harris

I would conclude that tradition is largely unnecessary for right Christian doctrine and practice, as the Scriptures are sufficiently perspicuous for individuals to determine right Christian doctrine and practice by themselves.

You're making a classic Protestant move, but you're ignoring how traditions *created* your Bible in the first place. The early church, working in living tradition, decided which texts were Scripture and which were heresy. Without that institutional memory, you have no canon. Here's the real problem: "sufficiently perspicuous" assumes everyone reads Scripture the same way. They don't. You get Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and prosperity gospel preachers all claiming the text speaks for itself. Tradition isn't baggage—it's the guardrails that keep interpretation from fracturing into chaos. Sola scriptura without sola ecclesia is just "me and my Bible," and history shows that produces theological disaster, not clarity.

The Church bears witness to which books are in the canon, but does not determine them as such. Nonetheless, the issue of canonicity is a meta-level question in comparison to the issue of interpretation.

Fair distinction, but you've just moved the problem, not solved it. If the Church merely "witnesses" to canon but doesn't determine it, who does? God's invisible hand? That's mysticism dressed as objectivity. And canonicity isn't meta-level separate from interpretation—it *is* interpretation. The moment you ask "which books belong," you're already interpreting what counts as authoritative revelation. You can't bracket that question away. The real issue: you still need an authority to settle disputes when individual readers disagree on doctrine. Scripture alone leaves you with competing "plain readings." Tradition provides that corrective force. Without it, you're just hoping everyone's personal interpretation aligns with truth.

Okay but there is a difference between (i) which books contain dogma and (ii) what do those books say dogma is. I understand you want to hangout at the meta-level problems, but that doesn't say to much about interpretation. Well Christians have been able to more or less agree on the primary points, like the cross, incarnation, etc.

You're right that Christians agree on basics—but watch what you're actually conceding. That agreement didn't happen through Scripture alone. It happened through centuries of councils, creeds, and institutional enforcement. Nicaea, Chalcedon, Athanasius fighting Arius—tradition *created* orthodoxy, not Scripture. And your "primary points" mask deeper fractures. Predestination, salvation by faith versus works, the Eucharist—these split churches precisely because Scripture "clearly" teaches opposite things to equally sincere readers. You're cherry-picking the easy agreements while ignoring where solo scriptura catastrophically fails. Tradition doesn't just witness to agreement. It *enforces* it. Without that enforcement, you get fragmentation.