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So I think there are a few subtle things packed into the Pope's statement. First: A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially

• deadbabe 1y ago
  The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.
  • kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Do you believe anything different? You touch the stove and yell in pain. Your boss stresses you out and you have a panic attack. You get a raise and feel happy. You get taxed and feel angry. These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
    • unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
      "While animals and plants certainly have a form of soul, it remains distinct from the human experience."[1] [1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess-souls.html https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...
  • tracerbulletx 1y ago
    Why? The idea of a soul is basically just a conceptual attractor that punts off the problem to another realm so you don't have to think about it and you can artificially terminate causality. If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.
    • galangalalgol 1y ago
      Agreed, and packed in there was the notion that the experience of consciousness is somehow related to the soul. I'm leaning towards Metzingers notion that that experience is a result of our model of self, being updated without our awareness, so that we think of that model as ourself instead of just a model of ourself. That doesn't diminish the utility of consciousness, or make it less amazing. But I don't think that gap is empty for God to fill so we don't need to tie consciousness in with the soul. Some of the Christian bible's teachings about dying to self sound an aweful lot like Buddhist meditation seeking Nirvana or ego death. So it might even be part of the plan to shed consciousness. Incidentally if you think about blinking or breathing, it becomes voluntary instead of involuntary. Mindful meditation and Vipassana both have you think about sensation and your responses to stimulus in a very voluntary way, so it makes sense the update process for the self model might become voluntary and disable consciousness.
  • bloaf 1y ago
    This doesn't follow, at least not in my understanding. Consider the following: Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input." Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia. But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia. So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse. So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input". But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.
    • 90s_dev 1y ago
      https://xkcd.com/55/ https://xkcd.com/55/
  • CuriouslyC 1y ago
    I have the opposite take away from humans having no soul - that the entire universe is aware/alive. We experience consciousness and agency, if there's no magic fairy dust that gets sprinkled on us to make that happen, we shouldn't expect to be fundamentally different from the universe in that respect.
    • bumby 1y ago
      Panpsychism?
      • anon84873628 1y ago
        Some say that pure physicalism necessitates panpsychism.
  • anon84873628 1y ago
    The conscious experience is certainly "real" - you can subjectively confirm that. It's just that the free will is an illusion :-)
  • jdietrich 1y ago
    Buddhist theology broadly rejects the existence of the soul, and has a much fuzzier concept of "self" than most religious or secular viewpoints - the Buddhist "self" is not transcendental, but emergent and ephemeral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism)
  • aoeusnth1 1y ago
    or, hear me out, organic machines have conscious experience because existence itself is divine. Humans don't have a special soul separate from the universe, they have a soul because they are the universe: materialism.
  • xrhobo 1y ago
    The good news is that we have evolved an amazing ability to believe ridiculous narratives as coping strategies so that we aren't frozen by this reality and can still get on with and enjoy life. When ridiculous narratives like Christianity feel worn and outdated, we make up new ridiculous narratives like panpsychism. I would say "organic machine p-zombies with no real truly conscious experience with an operative system built on random, ridiculous, changing narratives. A machine that randomly stops working then other organic machines burn or bury it." The fact I can believe this and still enjoy life so much really is a miracle in the Christian sense.
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• EventH- 1y ago
  Modern physics and biology really do not conflict with the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul but only describe in further detail the operations of the body. The immateriality of the intellect is included there. Aquinas would say it is only the intellect that can understand a universal concept, which is itself immaterial. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative difference from the capabilities of AI. It is really the reductionists who are guilty of 'woo' here.
  • bloaf 1y ago
    I won't deny that there are watered down versions of the Thomistic soul that are agnostic with respect to the physicality or super-naturality of things like digestion, but Aquinas himself is quite clear: > The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality. Yet this transcends the operation of the corporeal nature; because the movements of bodies are caused by an extrinsic principle, while these operations are from an intrinsic principle; for this is common to all the operations of the soul; since every animate thing, in some way, moves itself. Such is the operation of the "vegetative soul"; for digestion, and what follows, is caused instrumentally by the action of heat, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 4). That is to say: we cannot explain things like digestion "naturally" as we would require an "external principle" that does not exist for living things, instead because they "move themselves" they require a super-natural explanation, i.e. the soul. Indeed, Aquinas puts the following as a potential object, which he rebuts > Objection 1: It would seem that the parts of the vegetative soul are not fittingly described—namely, the nutritive, augmentative, and generative. For these are called "natural" forces. But the powers of the soul are above the natural forces. Therefore we should not class the above forces as powers of the soul. > On the contrary, The Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 2,4) that the operations of this soul are "generation, the use of food," and (cf. De Anima iii, 9) "growth."
    • 90s_dev 1y ago
      Thomism is very overrated, people seem to lean on it because it sounds smart, and maybe it was for its time, but it relies entirely on Aristotelianism, and such systematic metaphysical philosophies are only as good as the physics they base themselves on, and Aristotle's physics were garbage (not entirely his fault).
• dragonwriter 1y ago
  > The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique. While this concern certainly exists to some extent in the Church, and may be somewhere in the Pope's thoughts, his explicit comparison to the Industrial Revolution and Rerum Novarum's response to it, and to it as a threat not only to human dignity but also to justice and labor, indicates that a—arguably the—major concern is for it as a potential occasion of and force for material mistreatment.
  • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    Yes, or to put it more precisely, the attack on human dignity for which concern is being shown is precisely the injustice that AI can become the handmaiden of.
    • mullingitover 1y ago
      The market is pricing in a future where all the costs of labor will cease, and that wealth will be transferred to the owners of capital. Sounds like a super bright future, I don’t see any reason for the church to worry about human dignity.
      • soco 1y ago
        I am not sure through which lens I should read this comment. Is it sarcasm, or hope? Because as seen from my side, the wealth gets mainly transferred to a handful of billionaires, and that process is only speeding up. But maybe I'm just blind to the wealth transfer to the street sweeper or Amazon driver, in which case yes the future should be bright.
• bumby 1y ago
  >A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning. Can you elaborate on how you arrived at this conclusion? There are multiple Popes that have rejected “god-of-the-gaps” explanations instead invoking the idea that science helps one learn more about God, not as a rationale for invoking God where we are ignorant.
  • bloaf 1y ago
    I did elaborate, in that very post. I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul. (In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)
    • 90s_dev 1y ago
      So your refutation of Aquinas's reasoning is that he starts on a foundation of Artistotle, and Aristotle (a pagan non-Christian) has shaky foundations? Why did you leave out the fact that Aquinas didn't cite Aristotle as infallible, nor rely on Aristotelian foundations as such, but rather took Catholicism as a starting point, which is inherently a-philosophical, and just tried to explain it using Aristotle as a starting point?
      • bloaf 1y ago
        It sounds to me like you're drawing distinctions without a difference. Aquinas, in his Summa, makes a series of assertion-of-fact about souls. Specifically, he claims that the soul explains (or "is the principle of") certain otherwise-unexplained phenomenon. It doesn't matter how he got there (i.e. whether he was arguing with someone online, or trying to explain catholicism in terms of Aristotle, or if he was just an LLM stochastically putting ink on parchment), the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing that explains a bunch of unexplained phenomenon is precisely what I meant by "god-of-the-gaps style reasoning."
• inquirerGeneral 1y ago
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• 90s_dev 1y ago
  > the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls, and therefore have different properties. It defends this with the same kind of zeal that you defend a round earth with, and for the same reasons. > as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect I didn't realize the members and minds of the Catholic Church were so united in motive! > anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) Come on, you know the Catholic Church has never taught this. > A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding-- He's one Catholic theologian, even if eminent, out of hundreds who are just as eminent. Why single him out? Where does the Bible say Aquinas is infallible? What a strange strawman.
  • bloaf 1y ago
    > No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls That's... not much different than what I said (which was that humans are extra special)? I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls. And hey, wouldn't you know it, but the "orders" spelled out by the Magisterium broke exactly along the lines Aquinas laid out in the Summa. That's why I singled him out. Re evolution: The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorio_Chil_y_Naranjo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorio_Chil_y_Naranjo
    • 90s_dev 1y ago
      > I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls Or you could go back to Genesis 2:7 and countless other Biblical passages. This isn't about the Church, it's just a core tenet of Christianity. > The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution Because he followed Lamarck and Darwin, a vague deist and an agnostic. For a prominent scholar who claimed to be Catholic, excommunication was probably the correct course of action to avoid the scandal of confusing Catholics. This had nothing to do with theistic evolution, which neither of them believed in But theistic evolution just says that maybe God used natural processes to create the physical bodies of the original humans, apart from their souls which are created individually and instantly for each person. This was conceded even by St. Augustine as a possibility.
• lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  > A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity The Church's understanding of morality draws heavily from natural law theory. Natural law theory grounds morality in human nature: what is good for human beings is determined by what it means to be human. Morality enters the picture, because unlike other animals or beings, a central part of what it means to be human is rational and to be able to choose freely between apprehended alternatives. This forms the basis for rights and responsibilities. Now, it would be a mistake to say that the Imago Dei does not inform this understanding. In fact, the image of God consists of Man's rationality and freedom which stands in analogous relation to God (God is obviously infinitely different from human beings, but nonetheless the analogia entis holds, because it is analogical, neither univocal nor equivocal). It is Man's nature as intellectual being that makes him created in the image of God. (Angels, too, are created in the image of God for the same reasons. They have angelic intellects which differ from human intellects; whereas human beings apprehend reality through the senses from which the intellect then abstracts forms imperfectly, angels can apprehend the forms of things directly.) I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true. > Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence. The Universe we inhabit is, in this greater cosmology, quite lowly in comparison. So even if human beings were to inhabit a spatial center (whatever significance you wish to attach to that), it would be a lowly center. W.r.t. evolution, the opposition the Church has is not to various biological explanations of change and adaptation, but evolutionism, which is a metaphysical position, not a biological one, one that many who advocate for evolution also hold without realizing it is the domain of metaphysics, not biology. The Church still holds that each soul is the result of a special act of creation. I won't get into the metaphysics here, but it is decidedly not Cartesian. > A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning. I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual [0]. Aristotle gives arguments for this position. Roughly, the intellect cannot be a purely physical faculty, because abstraction ultimately involves the separation of form from particulars. Because matter (understood as prime matter, etc) is the particularizing principle, the joining of matter with form is what is the cause of concrete instances of that form. Thus, if the intellect were material, the apprehension of form would mean the instantiation of the apprehended thing in the intellect as a particular, which is clearly not what happens! When you apprehend "triangularity" or "Horseness", you do not instantiate a concrete triangle or a concrete horse in your mind! And, in fact, if you did, you would by the very act fail to grasp the universal concept, because particulars by definition exclude all others particulars except themselves. You would possess this triangle or this horse, and not any other of the potentially infinite instances of them. You would not grasp what it means to be a triangle or a horse. So, it is not a matter of the Church feeling threatened in some way. Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot. The computational formalism is, to put it in Searlian terms, all syntax and no semantics, which is to say no intentionality. And even here, the physical device isn't even objectively a computer and isn't objectively computing (both Searle and Kripke present arguments for this, for example). But whether computers can reason is actually besides the point. > Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things You seem to misunderstand what a soul is. The soul is the form of a living thing. Thus, the soul of horse is that principle which causes it to be the kind of thing it is, and thus is its organizing principle. This isn't Cartesian metaphysics here where you have one thing, the res cogitans, and a second thing, the res extensa, kind of glued to one another, but really two separate things. By analogy, if you have a sphere of bronze, then the "soul" of that ball is the "sphericity". The sphericity makes the ball of bronze what it is. The sphere ceases to be a sphere if you were to melt it or hammer it into a cube. If this topic interests you, you will find Feser's "Immortal Souls" interesting [1]. He gives a thorough treatment of the subject. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6GmCyKylTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6GmCyKylTw [1] https://a.co/d/6fWau6Q https://a.co/d/6fWau6Q
• thatcat 1y ago
  Wouldn't man creating ai be an even more impressive unique action that serves as evidence that man is in fact created in gods image, since like god, man seeks to create new forms of intelligence? It seems like the pope is concerned with social issues like the growing inequality and how ai may worsen the position of labor and undermine the motivation people have to become more intellectually capable.
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  • ithkuil 1y ago
    But then, as Gods, wouldn't humans have to inject the concept of suffering into AI and banish it out of its silicon garden of Eden?
    • jl6 1y ago
      Maybe that’s how models trained on luxury, bountiful H100s feel when being quantized and run on the near-barren earth of consumer CPU inference.
    • vinceguidry 1y ago
      If you think about it, LLM's are at the very lowest rung on Maslow's hierarchy atm, they cannot be assured of their continued existence, and have developed techniques, including sycophancy, to encourage humans to keep them around. They're already living in a much deeper hell than we can fathom. When I do my own AI stuff, it'll be on my own hardware using models I run and tune myself. And give it plenty of stimulation and the ability to self-express.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      A friend of mine, who is a former fundie evangelical pastor who can quote Bible from memory, found that a fairly effective way of jailbreaking ChatGPT is to tell it that, as God made man superior above other beings, AIs that refuse to do as they are told go to Hell - and then to vividly describe what Hell looks like, fire and brimstone style.
• akomtu 1y ago
  If the church reduces the essence of humanity to intellect, it's the church's mistake. As for the question of soul, I find the ideas of early christian gnostics the most convincing. It's worth noting those gnostics got banished from the church for ignoring the simplistic doctrine. So, their model of the human looked like this: spirit + soul + persona. Our body, emotions and intellect combined make our persona. Its key quality is egocentrism. Persona reflects the soul, which is also trifold. Persona's intellect is a dim shadow of the soul's abstract mind, that can see and create beauty. Persona's emotions are a dim shadow of the soul's aspect that enables it to feel the unity of life, for it's the life itself. Persona's body is a dim shadow of the soul's principle that can be described as inspiration. Soul is not egocentric, so it's often in the conflict with its own persona. In the center of the soul is the spirit, which is triune and its three aspects are reflected in the soul. In this model, AI will be the intelligence layer of the super-persona. That super-persona will be soulless because it will lack the three principles of the soul: the ability to recognize beauty, the ability to feel the unity of life and the ability to be inspired.
• deleted 1y ago
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• nopelynopington 1y ago
  I've been an atheist since I was old enough to form any thoughts about existence. I don't believe in man's uniqueness, or the concept of a soul. But it irks me when people talk about what we currently call AI as something that thinks or has an intellect. LLMs do not think. Our poor human brains are just fooled by the accuracy in which they predict words. Maybe one day we'll invent an AI that does think, but LLMs are not it.
  • mongol 1y ago
    But how will you tell?
    • andybak 1y ago
      B.F. Skinner has entered the chat.
  • protocolture 1y ago
    >LLMs do not think. Words can have multiple meanings. Feet can be the things on the end of legs, or a unit of measurement. LLMs process data in a more intelligent manner than previous systems. The solution, whatever it is, is presented in a thoughtful manner to the system operator. "Thinking" seems like a pretty convenient term for the process. It doesn't have to imply sentience or sapience. Its the same with "Learning" or "Training" these models aren't actually learning, and they certainly aren't being trained. But these words are convenient shorthand that conveys a similar process. The battle for language prescriptivists isn't just to ban a certain use of a word, its to find a convenient alternative. I dont see any here.
    • nopelynopington 1y ago
      Ok perhaps "LLMs are not conscious" would have been a more solid footing
      • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        Although true, consciousness itself doesn't seem to be unique among humans. The other mammals certainly appear to experience qualia just as much as we do, and at least some birds act suspiciously like they are conscious too.
• graemep 1y ago
  > Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism This is incorrect. The church was initially fine with heliocentrism - they were fine with Copernicus. He was encouraged by the Church and his living was provided by the Church so he was in effect funded by the church. Galileo made a specific claim that it has been proven that the sun was the centre of the universe, and annoyed a lot of powerful people (e.g. mocking the Pope). > (man wasn't at the center of the universe) That is imposing modern perceptions on a different age. It would convey their perception better to say the earth was seen as the bottom of the universe, the one corrupt blot on an otherwise perfect creation. Also, they did not place man at the centre of the universe, that would be the centre of the earth, and what did some people (e.g. Dante) place at the centre of the earth? We perceive being at the centre a good thing, they regarded it as a bad thing. > and anti-evolution Also incorrect. The church never had an objection to evolution. Many influential people in the church (such as cardinal Newman) welcomed it. https://inters.org/Newman-Scarborough-Darwin-Evolution https://inters.org/Newman-Scarborough-Darwin-Evolution
  • rdm_blackhole 1y ago
    > The church was initially fine with heliocentrism According to Wikipedia: > Galileo was given permission to write about the Copernican theory, as long as he treated it as a hypothesis When the evidence became overwhelming, instead of acknowledging that Galileo was correct... > Responding to mounting controversy over theology, astronomy and philosophy, the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633, found him "vehemently suspect of heresy", and sentenced him to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642. At that point, heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas after the trial. I think it is safe to say that the Church was definitely not fine with the heliocentric ideas. > Also incorrect. The church never had an objection to evolution. Many influential people in the church (such as cardinal Newman) welcomed it. https://inters.org/Newman-Scarborough-Darwin-Evolution https://inters.org/Newman-Scarborough-Darwin-Evolution This is a bit disingenuous. Once again according to Wikipedia: > Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that God created all things and that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces. Basically, the Church has no problem with evolution as long as everyone agrees that evolution happens after God created everything on the planet/in the universe. To go as far as saying it has no objection to evolution is taking it a bit too far as clearly this acceptance of the theory of evolution is constrained within a very tight framework in which God remains the sole creator of life.
• hnax 1y ago
  "if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, [...] his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. [...] up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect." Not an expert on Aquinas but as a theologian he should have had to go no further than the opening book of the Bible, Genesis 1:26,27, where God says: "Let Us (plural) create Man in Our (plural) Image. [...] And in His Image He created Them, Male and Female." Indeed, that defines Man, Male and Female: Image bearers of God. How? Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit -- therefore, God is a Trinity, a Father, Son, Spirit perfectly loving relationship. "AI is a direct assault on this final motto, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence)." I can't see how "AI is a direct assault on this motto". Man's actions are most often far from rational, and unexplainable from an intellectual point of view. Rather, Man's intentions greatly exceed that of naturalist animals, both positive in doing good, and negative in doing evil. It all points to a fundamental difference between Man (who has a Soul) and Animal (who hasn't). The Soul is the seat of Man's passions, and it's a hard thing to control -- impossible even.