First: 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. Because of this, the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man, as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect. 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 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.

Second: 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, its painfully clear that his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things, but up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect. AI is a direct assault on this final motte, 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).

Aquinas: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm

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.

Sounds like a super bright future, I don’t see any reason for the church to worry about human dignity.

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

Not exactly. In the 1500s, theologians drew a VERY sharp line between writing about heliocentrism as a hypothesis (permitted) and writing about it as a fact (forbidden). It seems like a trivial difference to us, but you could get the boot for it back then.

In 1616 he was accused of crossing the line. He was interviewed by Cardinal Bellarmine who issued him an exoneration document saying that he had not crossed the line into heresy and could therefore teach heliocentrism as a hypothesis like anyone else. In 1633 a file clerk discovered the unsigned 'plan B' version of that document which would have meant that he was on probation for heresy and NOT allowed to write about heliocentrism even hypothetically. They discovered during the trial that the document was invalid and he was not guilty of what he had been accused of. It was a mess.

Funny thing, the bone of contention back then wasn't so much about the sun being at the center of tbe universe. That itself wasn't heresy. The theological red line was disagreeing with bible passages that say the Earth shall not move, without hard evidence of a moving earth. (Which didn't become available until about 70 years later.)

I'd recommend The Trial Of Galileo, by Doug Linder (2002), which goes into detail about exactly what was and what was not prohibited. -- http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/galile...

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

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.

>> Galileo was given permission to write about the Copernican theory, as long as he treated it as a hypothesis

I cannot find that in Wikipedia's article about Galileo.

So why was neither Copernicus (who initial proposed the theory) or anyone else subjected to restrictions like that?

Also, it was a hypothesis that was proved to the wrong. The sun is not the centre of the universe. He was wrong to claim it had been proved it was. It was not even the best supported theory on the available evidence (there were several theories competing to replace the Ptolemaic model).

> 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.

How does that constrain evolution? The Universe was created a few billion years before evolution even started!

The Catholic Church actually initially funded Copernicus and was interested in his findings, but this was the reformation and counter-reformation, so that context is extremely important as to why their stance changed.

What they did to Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, is a massive stain on the church.

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.

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)

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."

And therein lies my point: the purpose of Aquinas was purely to explain preexisting Catholic theology, using Aristotle as a starting point. He invented nothing.

You can say "the Catholic Church invented the soul to explain [etc]" and then I'd just push it back to Christianity itself, and if you'd concede on that, we'd have resolved my initial argument.

Many Christian theologians attempted to demonstrate the existence of God rationally, so I don't know what about that process would have been considered heretical in its own right. I'd agree that the claim (associated with Deists, for example) that one could have a complete religion based exclusively on reason with no revelation, or that all purported divine revelations are untrustworthy, would have been considered heretical.

The first rabbi who goes the above path - and during his time, his books were often burnt.

It still is, according to Catholicism, which says you must have reason and faith in the divine revelation it claims to preserve, which reveals some aspects of God and reality that we cannot reach or conclude with pure reason alone, such as the Blessed Virgin Mary's Immaculate Conception (BVMIC for short) or the Trinity (T for short).

*Assuming by metaphysical you mean formal.

If you want a tidy introduction to metaphysics of this sort, consider this one [0].

[0] https://a.co/d/3g8SgTf

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.

I understand that you're responding within the thread, but to take this back to the original point, which is about human dignity, justice and labor:

LLMs do not need to “think” for the point to be valid. Chess engines do not “think” and do not have any conception of what they're really doing, but they still win at chess every time. The worry is that AI will put an end to human dignity, not that it “thinks too much”.

Then it doesn’t matter if LLMs are better than us, at least unless they can be shown to have equivalent depth of experience.

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.

So why couldn't a large collection of statistical variables be conscious? Mathematically, it's the same thing.

Not on topic, but I dont think thats going to be relevant.

If a human thinks something is conscious, and feels bad if it gets hurt, it will probably get treated as such.

They are, at their core, predictive text engines.

And this is is just my opinion, yours may of course differ. Maybe you believe humans are just predictive text engines

They're high on their own supply, if you will.

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.

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.

> 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."

Edward Feser's book Aquinas is a good starting point for understanding it.

Indeed, Aquinas is using the soul the way that modern scientists use "dark matter". Except where the modern problem is unexpected rates of universal expansion, Aquinas' problem is vitalism-qua-"why are living things different than non-living things."

Once we abandoned vitalism, the conception of the soul must therefore also change. But in my reading of history, there is no clear break; no "before" and "after". Aquinas' definitions and concepts were never really abandoned, the church just retreated from the bailey of "the soul explains all the features of living matter including how it moves around" to the motte of "the soul explains intellect/reason/will since thats the only thing left thats not obviously physical."

Indeed, you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul, even though the official teachings are usually a slightly generalized version of Aquinas's concrete assertions.

I wish I could find the document, but about 2 years ago, the Vatican released an official document explaining that Rome had been using certain philosophical traditions, including Thomism, in its official documents and councils for a few hundred years, because it was convenient, yet without making it official to any degree. I was so happy when it came out because it vindicated what I had been telling all my Thomist friends, that Thomism is not official Catholic doctrine.

Metaphysics is not some interchangeable bolt-on to theology, like the parts of a vacuum cleaner. If you change metaphysics, you change theology. Nominalism led directly to Protestantism, for example. Hume and Kant led directly to theological modernism (and heavily influenced personalism). Etc.

As St. John Henry Newman put it: "Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part it tells us of persons and facts in simple words"

Metaphysics are not a required aspect of Catholic theology, because Catholic theology is neither systematic nor a philosophy, but just a set of objective, historical claims. They might have implications, but even those are unclear.

For example, with the story of the multiplying of the fish and the loaves, there is no definitive answer as to how this occurred. Only that over five thousand people were there, they had this many loaves, everyone ate their fill, and afterwards they had more loaves left over.

Metaphysics might be helpful in guessing how this happened, but it's neither required nor infallible when explaining it.

Examples of the importance of metaphysics to theology are innumerable. To take a few off the top of my head:

If you don't hold to a classical metaphysics, your understanding of transubstantiation will be different from the Church's. Locke, famously, mocked the idea of 'substance', so one can hardly believe in transubstantiation while holding to a Lockean metaphysics.

If you are a metaphysical idealist after the manner of Berkeley, the quote from Newman you provided can't be right, because persons and facts would be mere artifacts of the mind.

With the multiplying of the fish and loaves, we only know that this is a miracle because we know that a miracle is something that occurs outside the normal course of nature; but we only know that there is a normal course of nature because of a particular metaphysics. (If we adopt Hume's metaphysics, for example, then there is no normal course of nature, and so everything is a miracle, and so there should be nothing unusual or surprising about the multiplication of the fish and loaves.)

As we've seen, what you understand by the word 'soul' is profoundly affected by metaphysics.

And so on and so on. Metaphysics affects everything. People who say we don't need it, whether they're discussing natural science, theology, ethics, politics, or whatever else, end up contradicting themselves without fail. History is replete with examples.

The very recent official Vatican document I referred to elsewhere here explained that, while the Church has utilized Aristotelian explanations of Catholic theology, especially as used by St. Thomas Aquinas, even in official Church documents such as the Council of Trent, this in no way officialized this theology, but was only used as a convenience.

> If you don't hold to a classical metaphysics, your understanding of transubstantiation will be different from the Church's. (The word only makes sense in an Aristotelian context.)

Right, the Catholic Church says that if you use St. Thomas Aquinas's explanations of Catholic theology through the framework of Aristotle, then yes, his explanations are correct. However, it also says you do not need to use his framework, and in fact new ways of explaining Catholic theology should be sought out, in much the same way the Early Church Fathers did.

> And so on and so on. Metaphysics affects everything.

> because persons and facts would be mere artifacts of the mind.

These two things you said are clearly showing me that you're not understanding me.

You're thinking of everything I'm saying through the eyes of some metaphysics. You're presuming it.

I'm not. I'm looking at reality in a common, everyday way, experientially, in the same way practically every person does all the time in their daily lives.

The difference is depth.

When we examine any aspect of reality, you seem to take it as far down as you concretely can. (I wonder if it's all just turtles for you.) You go depth first.

Whereas I myself go breadth first, and only as deep as needed to resolve a given question.

So when we talk about the multiplying of the loaves, you've already brought metaphysics in. You've presumed some kind of framework.

Whereas when I think about it, there is a point A and a point B. The point A is the historical facts as laid out by the gospel authors. The point B is some question, such as "how did they end up with more bread?" or "where did the new bread come from?"

For me, I don't need to go beyond answering the concrete questions. I draw in whatever external questions and answers are needed to answer the question I'm faced with. That may result in me pulling in a framework.

For St. Thomas Aquinas, it did. He pulled in Aristotle, patched it up, married it to Catholic theology, and used that.

I don't have to. I go through this process much more shallowly. The best analogy is that I use lazy evaluation of such questions, and you seem to think with fully eager evaluation. Almost as if it were an inherent necessity.

So yes, of course the form of a living thing is what makes it be different from a non-living thing! That in no way implies vitalism, if by that you mean a mysterious force that makes a dead but otherwise complete animal body come alive. The form (soul) of a body is what makes this particular body -- and body is understood in the classical sense of "solid lump of matter", not in the modern sense where it refers only to an animal -- be what it is. Just as it would be for any other material thing in reality.

And to head off the charge of obscurantism, and deal with your "god of the gaps" assertion, this not meant to be a complete, biological explanation. Nor is it meant to be some explanation for something that we can't otherwise understand by scientific means. It is only the beginning of an explanation of why a thing is what it is. It falls to the particular science, in this case biology, to flesh out (pun not intended) the details.

Hylemorphism (the form-matter distinction) is an absolutely basic Aristotelian doctrine, and without understanding it, complete confusion will result from trying to understand Aquinas' (or Aristotle's) discussion about the soul. Of course, you may think hylemorphism is nonsense, but that's a different argument.

You also refer to the soul as a "supernatural" principle in a previous post. Again, this way of talking and thinking is utterly foreign to Aquinas. He does not think digestion requires a supernatural explanation. This shows a very grave misunderstanding.

Second, the soul is not, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic thesis, a "supernatural" being, as an angel or God would be since (though not material themselves) they properly belong to the material order.

So these are natural, not supernatural explanations, which nevertheless go beyond the purely material (corporeal) and so are 'above' them. In the quoted article, he means that these characteristic activites of living things are not simply reducible to those of the material parts themselves, since the living thing possesses the principle of its own organization/growth/reproduction etc. that non-living material does not, so something beyond the non-living 'corporeal' order must be operating.

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.

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

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.

Scholasticism is also exclusively Western, but philosophy was and is as important in the Christian East as the West.

In the big picture, Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th Century) is probably as important as Aquinas with respect to overall development of Western Catholic thought.

In Eastern Catholic/Orthodox thought there are luminaries such as Gregory of Nazianzus (4th Century) and John of Damascus (7th/8th Century).

What you may be thinking of is Pope Leo XIII’s ultra high praise of Aquinas in Aeterni Patris, published in 1879.

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...

These properties were never proven but simply asserted. Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Also why draw the line between human and animal souls, what about bacteria and viruses?

> It defends this with the same kind of zeal that you defend a round earth with, and for the same reasons.

That is disingenuous, we have an overwhelming amount of evidence that the Earth is round whereas the concept of souls and their supposed differences have been asserted for centuries but never proven.

That's my problem with the concept of religion. When the tough questions are asked, the only answers given are of the special pleading kind and/or simply asserting that something is correct in a tautological way.

No proof necessary, how convenient!

I wasn't talking about whether they were proven, only where the assertions came from.

> Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

No one here claimed they never tried to provide evidence, we just didn't refer to such attempts since it wasn't relevant to the conversation you joined.

> Also why draw the line between human and animal souls, what about bacteria and viruses?

In context of Catholic theology, those would probably fall under "animal" souls. Just because we didn't use those words doesn't mean they aren't considered.

> That is disingenuous, we have an overwhelming amount of evidence that the Earth is round whereas the concept of souls and their supposed differences have been asserted for centuries but never proven.

They have not been proven to your satisfaction, but in context of Catholic theology, evidence is provided for these, and many find it satisfactory.

> That's my problem with the concept of religion. When the tough questions are asked, the only answers given are of the special pleading kind and/or simply asserting that something is correct in a tautological way.

Maybe you're reading the wrong authors. I wonder what you think of Trent Horn. He seems like a fairly sound apologist.

> No proof necessary, how convenient!

It sounds like you've only read fluffy Protestant books from the last 30 years. No Catohlic theologian I've ever read attempts to make claims without providing evidence, even if that evidence doesn't convince you personally.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism)

These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.

[1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...

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

[1] https://a.co/d/6fWau6Q

This is true, although I do want to draw a bit of a distinction between the churches understanding-qua-official-teaching, and understanding-qua-what-actual-catholic-officials-believe. I often see very devout people look at something like CCC 1956:

> The natural law, present in the heart of each man and established by reason, is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all men. It expresses the dignity of the person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties

and come away with "Our moral rights and duties derive from our dignity via natural law" which isn't quite right, but nevertheless drives their behavior.

Its just like how the church finally, in 1822, explicitly allowed heliocentric books to be published. Technically, the church never officially asserted geocentrism as a doctrine and so heliocentric books should have been fine, but in practice, the chief censors were actually prohibiting them from being published because it was the common view among officials at the time that the church had in fact officially condemned heliocentrism in the Galileo case.

> I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true.

Yes, the better word for me to use would have been axiom; I was muddling my mathematical terms a bit.

> I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual

I am saying that because of the belief that "you can't explain that physically" where that = "abstraction", we've entered "God of the gaps" territory.

Now its true, I have read philosophical arguments that abstraction (or in the case of Ed Feser's argument, Incompossibility) is fundamentally impossible to do physically. And indeed, if those arguments succeeded we would be out of the woods. But I've universally found the philosophy to be very weak; to the point that even an amateur philosopher like myself can see that there are real-actual logical flaws, or that they rely on what appear to be extremely weak premises.

> 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.

This is precisely the worry. This is a falsifiable prediction of Catholic theology: the instant there exists an AI which can actually reason, Catholic theology will have been falsified.

Now no doubt the Catholic philosophers will respond to such an eventuality by simultaneously claim that the machine isn't "doing it right" and that "our other accounts of Catholic theology are better anyway", but real credibility-damage will be done to Catholic theology.

1. We have the sense that "science progresses one funeral at a time." An AI model could be used to recognize situations where a single viewpoint is getting a disproportionate amount of attention in the literature, and warn journals+funding agencies about any disconnects between attention and quality of work.

2. We have the sense that "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So" An AI model could identify the most high-profile results in the literature that have contradicting evidence and call for further, decisive study.

3. Interdisciplinary translation. There are many many cases of different branches of science re-discovering each other's work. I believe I read an article a little bit ago about an academic in a somewhat softer science publishing a paper proudly claiming the discovery of linear regression. Obviously not all cases are so egregious, but an AI could advance a discipline just by pointing out areas where that discipline is using outdated/inferior methods compared to the state of the art.

* The US is poised to strongly take Israel's side in a conflict with Iran, which could easily evolve into either a misadventure, oil shock, or WW3

* The US is poised to withdraw from NATO, ceding a significant amount of geopolitical clout to Russia in particular. This would undermine a bunch of our military efforts abroad, relegating them to the bin of "misadventure." To say nothing of the proposed acquisition of Greenland.

They might happen any year.

And fortunately, Iran isn't doing anything belligerent at the moment -- they got their butts kicked last year and are missing a lot of their previous protection. And no, the US isn't "poised to withdraw from NATO". Nobody's even talking about that. I mean, a lot of bad stuff is going on, but withdrawal from NATO has not been in any news cycles.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/politics/trump-2025-na...

* https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/trump-may-withdraw-us-from-n...

* https://www.fairobserver.com/politics/its-time-for-the-us-to...

* https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/analytics/nato-under-trump-possib...

I don't know how close to withdrawing from NATO the US actually is, but people are talking about it. The aggressive stance the US President has towards two NATO members makes it seem like it could happen soon.

* https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-offshore-drilling-gul...

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-canada-nato-allies-1....

Sure you can write what-if's, but the current administration hasn't brought it up. They've brought up a lot of bad and dumb stuff, but not that.

Trump, the current president of the US, is. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-would-happen-us-leaves-...

Congress found the scenario credible enough to pass a law specifically making it more difficult for him to do unilaterally.

> But none of the things have happened yet, nor are there any signs they're immediately about to.

Proving the nonexistence of signs is not a position I would be willing to take as it is far too philosophically difficult to defend.

The reality is that both the Ukrainian and Iranian situations are far from an equilibrium; there don't need to be signs to know that dramatic changes are coming, we just can't tell what those changes will actually look like.

None of that is anywhere close to "poised". You're linking to an article describing a comment from 7 years ago.

"A 2% chance of happening this year" (or even 10%) is not "poised".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Decimal_Classificati...

I incorrectly assumed it would have some basic linear algebra solution because of how simple the problem seemed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXnSYfv6bCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongkrek_acid

I normally dislike the typical podcasters/podcasts because of their self promoting and low information density nature but I thought this one was ok to recommend.

Obviously most of the 'AI researchers' right now are not altruistic, but it is possible to take the position that advancing AI will be sufficiently valuable to society that it overrides corporate preferences against bulk scraping.