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Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25
(vaticannews.va)
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by cucho
by cucho
Also, even though I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity, I think that much of the world has long since lost a proper sense of intrinsic human value. It's really gone from overt exploitation to slightly more mild exploitation where we pretend the system is really merit based.
And as AI and robotics remove the need for human labor, I hope that someone like the pope can convince people that we should value human beings inherently and more fairly. Inexpensive labor and intelligence should make this feasible.
I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point.
The really convincing and somewhat deeper simulations of humans are probably only a few years down the line though.
Which comes back to the Rovelli dualism article that was on the front page before. I think we should not be in a hurry to try to duplicate humans in depth (such as imitating emotions, pain, stream of consciousness, self-preservation, etc). It's just completely unnecessary to go that far to get useful AI, and obviously unethical to subject a real human emulation to slavery.
Why? And what does “progressing” mean, exactly? I’m not trying to be combative or flippant, I’m genuinely asking because the rest of your comment is a great argument for the opposite view.
I’d argue humanity will “progress” when we collectively learn to treat each other and our environment with respect and care. When we have a sense of community with our fellow people instead of placing undue value on individuals and personal gain.
Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it.
We already have the technology and resources to improve the lives of everyone, they’re just not fairly distributed.
Whether that implies anything about subjective experience... I think that question is unknowable by definition. Either substrate matters (in which case things have to be made of carbon for some reason?), or it doesn't (in which case... God only knows what that implies. Windows XP might have subjective experience).
It really is en vogue to have this attitude that everyone in church is stupid for believing but it's a huge disservice to yourself to not understand the Vatican is full of the equivalent of the best PhDs sourced from all over the world centered around their specific topic of interest, theology.
Also for the time being you can see that the Vatican understands AI much better than you already, just have a read here: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu... [0]
> ANTIQUA ET NOVA > Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence
This is the position of the Catholic Church, so don't expect anything different.
My hope is that, within those boundaries, he may find something interesting and meaningful to say.
What I can find is only Aquinas that all living things have souls (anima). Humans have rational human souls. Animals have animal souls...
Descartes believed that only humans have souls. But that definitely represents a clear alternative to traditional Catholic beliefs. Many modern philosophers might argue that only humans have "consciousness" in a way that implies animals do not have souls.
Factories were supposed to deliver us from work, automation was supposed to deliver us from work, computers were supposed to deliver us from work, now it's """AI""", tomorrow it'll be "quantum computers", the next time it'll be "cold fusion". It does not work and will never work, because it's not a bug in the system, it is the system
I hope it is, because we already have the likes of Dawkins spilling opinions like “machines are conscious”.
So here we have a figure of authority saying humans are soulless but machines are conscious, furthering the argument that it’s okay to exploit humans, there’s nothing special about them if we can replace them with a machine.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-o...
That catholic church has a long and sordid history of protecting its own.
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You'd have made strange bedfellows with cranky Catholics who thought so too, 60 years ago after Vatican II's modernization reforms.
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
Hold on a sec, you ought to clarify what you mean by "gain more members" - the Amish have a very high birthrate, averaging 6.1 kids per woman. While Unitarians are below the replacement rate.
> Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games.
How is this old culture-wars canard still being rolled out? A glance at the character rosters on the Game of the Year winners for the past 10 years proves you wrong.
Post-industrial world needed human capital. Hence, the need for human value. If you notice most of this "need" has arisen out of then need for industrial expansion.
Post-AI will be interesting. Will we go back to pre-industrial or get something better.
Most of us humans inherently value each other. There are exceptions, and small communities can get nasty. But for the most part, small human communities tend to be supportive and valuing each other.
This really only stops being the case when you get large-scale societies that allow humans to view others through an overly abstract lens. Combine that with an unchecked accumulation of power, and you have the potential for those in power to view the rest as without value.
> Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25. A presentation event with the Pope and various speakers is scheduled for the same day at the Vatican.
Among the "various speakers" is Christopher Olah. But hard to express under 80 characters I bet.
- Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum; current Pope Leo XIV chose his name as an explicit gesture to his nominative predecessor
- This encyclical is a return to the earlier tradition of latin names (Magnifica Humanitas) for encyclicals, as opposed to many of Pope Francis' which used Italian (Laudato si')
- The official date it was signed was 135 years to the day since Rerum Novarum
- The Pope is personally appearing and speaking at the presentation; usually these encyclicals are just released at a small press conference without the Pope himself being there
Rerum Novarum intentionally tracked a third path, rejecting both socialism and laissez faire capitalism at the end of the 19th century. Gesturing so overtly towards it suggests that this new encyclical will also try to establish a "third way," grounded (as the title suggests) in human dignity.
Leo XIV has not published any encyclicals yet; this will be his first, and an extremely ambitious one at that. I also am very eager to read it.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
Chris Olah, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, got in touch. What followed was, by McGuire’s own description, mind-blowing. “They basically were asking for direct help from the Vatican to convene and help the industry, because the industry was going so fast down this road,” he recalled.
I hope it's some sort of covert invitation to convert/repent. The doors are always open for those who want to cross it :).
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
Someone on HN wondered if that text could be the Magna Charta for the AI age.
What we do need is a lot more ordinary people to do something about it.
> Magnifica humanitas will be presented on the day of its release at 11:30 a.m. at the Vatican’s Synod Hall.
> [...]
> The Pope will be present, along with several speakers:
> [...]
> Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic (USA) and head of research on the interpretability of artificial intelligence [...][deleted]
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Papal Encyclicals[0] are solely authored by the Pope, even if there has been secular scholarship involved in the writing. It is never "presented" by anyone else, and to frame it as presented primarily by Christopher Olah "alongside" the pope is to betray an ignorance of what's officially going on.
Not sure how we arrived at the present title, "Anthropic co-founder to present AI encyclical alongside Pope Leo XIV", but it makes as much sense as "Iceberg nearly completes mainden voyage across Atlantic, with famous ship as passenger."
https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/Techisturningincreasinglytore...
Why are the AI companies meeting with them at all? Just seems uncomfortable and suspicious.
Regardless of content, it seems an extra step in solidifying where power lies.
Normally when I see these sorts of things it’s obvious what it is for and why, but this one confuses me.
If you've read any Vatican publications, the theme is being the authority on the ontology of reality.
EDIT: A decree for bioethics https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu... I'd expect a similar deal for AI.
The economy is complicated and those high-level indexes are gross simplifications of a mass of complexity, but they're not entirely unrelated to whether people have money to spend and whether our liberalized economy is functioning. In fact, I'd suggest that our economy is increasingly suffering from the population's inability to participate and drive the maximal capital flows and prosperity that are possible. There is an additional distributive and concentration problem which we have been solving even more poorly lately.
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Paraphrasing and old soviet joke -- and I also saw the human whose condition it improves
It's more than a matter of losing sight. This is endemic to liberal hyperindividualism which places the individual and "consumer utility" at the center of economic activity. This ideological presupposition actively works against human flourishing - and even the viability of an economy at all - as a precondition for successful economies is so-called "normal social reproduction". Our consumerist economic order is actively hostile to stable family formation and fecundity (as evidenced by precipitous demographic decline) and thus to the health of society in general.
The economy is indeed supposed to be in the service of human flourishing. Modern economics instead optimizes for "utility maximization".
Indeed. This is characteristic of a reflexive and unthinking Progressivism that presumes the reality of some kind of nebulous, arbitrary, and ill-defined "progress", but very often denies the very basis that makes progress of any kind possible, which is teleology. In other words, Progressivism is one of the modernist idols in Nietzsche. The modern haughtily throws off the "old metaphysics" and the "old religion", but fails to notice how it has sawed off the branch it is sitting on. Its peculiar form of worship, its peculiar focus, is hollow because it has been gutted of the concepts that it draws a residual parasitic strength from. Hence, the twilight of the idols...
Postmodernism is to a large degree a reaction to the emptiness of modernism. Postmodernism is also self-refuting, but to its credit, it does respond to something very true about modernism. We are witnessing postmodernism bury the last vestiges of modernism along with itself. It is an ideological kamikaze.
> Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it.
Why can’t it be both? I’m optimistic that AI and robotics will produce innovations that will benefit all of humanity, even if the financial gains are concentrated among the few.
Are AI and robotics “important” for that, though? I’m not convinced they are, or that their detriments are worth it. E.g. maybe a fleet of robot police could reduce deaths from violence, but it would also certainly be used for citizen control.
Caring for our fellow humans as a community and thus sharing resources and knowledge appropriately would be much more beneficial.
Additionally, it’s not like Pinker’s argument is without (a lot) of criticism. It doesn’t seem like a good basis for this conversation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
The rise of the alt-right and the current state of the USA and the division it is causing worldwide does not bode well for the argument that the world is progressing in a desired direction.
> Why can’t it be both?
Because you can’t have shared values of community and care for your fellow humans and the environment when the ones with the concentrated power gain it and keep by doing the exact opposite.
> I’m optimistic that AI and robotics will produce innovations that will benefit all of humanity, even if the financial gains are concentrated among the few.
I said “power”, not “money”. They are related but not the same. AI and robotics bring new capabilities for despots to surveil, control, and kill. It is naive to believe these will benefit all of humanity. They clearly won’t. Recent history is ample proof of that.
I’m sure there are Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings superfans who have put in a PhD level of time and research into their favorite “topic of interest” as well.
Religions’ primary purpose is to facilitate tribal bonds, not experimentally seek truths and evaluate data for consistency. That is why almost all start with a set of tenets or immutable “facts”, such as the existence of an immortal component of a person (usually called a soul).
That's what religion does, but so does "working in Silicon Valley for a tech company". What religion is is another matter entirely.
The joke was meant to poke a little fun at superfans and not to belittle.
> ANTIQUA ET NOVA
> Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence
> https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html
Let's see how the direction evolves with the new Pope and 1.5 years later.
It doesn’t take a high academia credential to develop a critical mindset about established institutions, and quite the opposite seems more likely.
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The soul, according to an Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding, is the form of a living thing. Form is what makes a thing what it is. If you deny form, then you deny that things have any identity whatsoever and the world becomes unintelligible. Science itself becomes impossible.
So, the form is the formal cause of a thing's identity, and so everything that exists has a formal cause, because you cannot not have something that isn't something. In living things, we call this form the soul; we sometimes say that the soul is the form of the body. Accordingly, it is absurd to think of the soul and the body to be two things (like Descartes thought), just as it is absurd to treat the spherical shape of a ball of bronze as a distinct thing from the bronze. There is no sphericial-shape-as-such or bronze-as-such as things in the world.
While Descartes denied the consciousness of non-human animals, this was never the Aristotelian-Thomist position. In fact, it is taken to be flatly wrong. So denial of the consciousness of non-human animals is not really traditional at all. It is very much modern.
> Endowed with "a spiritual and immortal" soul, The human person is "the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake."
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/secti...
IIUC, he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time. Rather, it's something that later theologians (Aquinas?) picked up from Greek philosophy (Platonism?).
I wonder if that means Wright would have a different take on the whole "only humans have souls" idea. (Beyond just differing on the choice of terminology, I mean.)
That's a broadly accepted take among religious historians, although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Philo of Alexandria did begin to integrate Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy on the soul during his lifetime.
> although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora.
Mind expanding on this part?
* https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/aliens-and-...
I'm not sure there's a 'definitive' statement as of yet as to AI, but things tend to be leaning towards needing to be biological:
* https://www.catholic.com/audio/caf/can-artificial-intelligen...
* https://www.ncregister.com/interview/the-mind-and-the-machin...
Not sure if this means carbon-based or not:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
Some thoughts from a philosophy professor (who is Catholic):
> 2. “But neurons do what logic gates do. So we know that computers can be intelligent, because they are essentially doing what our brains are doing.”
> No, they aren’t. True, there are causal relations between neurons that are vaguely analogous to the causal relations holding between logic gates and other elements of an electronic computer. But that is where the similarity ends, and it is a similarity that is far less significant than the differences between the cases. Logic gates are designed by electrical engineers in a way that will make them suitable for interpretation as implementing logical functions. No one is doing anything like that with neurons. In particular, no one is assigning an interpretation as implementing a logical function, or any other interpretation for that matter, to neurons. (The point is simple and obvious, but commonly overlooked precisely because it is so obvious, like the tip of your nose that you never notice precisely because it is right in front of you.)
> That brings us to a second difference […]
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Feser
He has a few books, including one entitled Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide), so has thought about this.
The last 100+ years have also been atypical. Two world wars which disrupted economies in ways that lead to redistribution, huge changes from the end of European empires, the fall of the Soviet Union and communism, and technological advances that automated work but created may new jobs.
I would be very reluctant to assume a continuing trend from that.
You would think that a great reduction in extreme poverty would give people pause, but it is almost always barely acknowledged. The strange conclusion is that people who tell you they care the most about poverty do not actually care about it in the slightest. It is just a vehicle for their resentment.
Maybe they've grown. Is Bangladesh at the stage where they outsource labour to other countries yet?
I think it was dusted off when the game Mixtape received glowing reviews despite there being hardly any actual gameplay in it.
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Let it go. It's not healthy. Witch hunts like this are not helping anyone with anything, other than influencer grifters.
You forgot these gems:
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Game / Publication | Year | Estimated Loss | Layoffs / Fallout |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Concord | 2024 | ~$400,000,000 | Studio Closed |
| Suicide Squad: KTJL | 2024 | ~$200,000,000 | 50%+ of QA Cut |
| Skull & Bones | 2024 | ~$150M - $200M | Heavy Global Cuts |
| Star Wars Outlaws | 2024 | ~$100M - $150M | Massive Studio Cuts |
| Hyenas | 2023 | ~$100,000,000 | 240+ Staff Cut |
| Saints Row | 2022 | ~$100,000,000 | Studio Closed |
| Highguard | 2026 | ~$80M - $100M | Studio Closed |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| MEDIA & JOURNALISM STATUS UPDATES |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Game Informer | 2024 | Brand Dissolved | Shuttered by Owner |
| Polygon | 2025 | Sold / Gutted | Mass Editorial Cuts |
| Eurogamer Network | 2026 | Multi-Wave Cuts | Core Teams Laid Off |
| Giant Bomb | 2025 | Dismantled | Core Talent Left |
| Inverse & The Verge | 2026 | Verticals Closed | Sections Abolished |
| Launcher (Wash. Post) | 2023 | Verticals Closed | Division Shut Down |
+-----------------------+------+--------------------+---------------------+
See the last two columns? Those are rookie numbers, we gotta pump those numbers up till we send them all to Doordash and Chili's, then the gaming industry can start to heal.
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Why not? When i was an agnostic I liked the Catholic church as an institution (and many other religious organisations too).
> The idea is that by relaxing norms, he wants to gain more members.
That is a ridiculously cynical take. People join the church, and even more the priesthood because they believe. Why would they corrupt the message to get the numbers up?
I do not know what norms have been relaxed by the church anyway? Changing the mass used by the majority of Catholics? Its happened many times historically.
> But it doesn't actually go that way. It alienates the core, and the people for whom compromises are made don't want to join anyway.
I see no sign of alienation except in small fringe groups (so not the "core").
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
The Catholic church is growing globally.
OP doesn't appear to be saying Catholicism ought not to grow - rather that they believe trying to appeal to a wider audience than that which is already interested in religion is likely to fail, or worse, backfire.
Religions grow by appealing to a wider audience than that which is already interested. That is precisely how Christianity spread in the first place.
What the Catholic Church is doing is not backfiring even in the terms of the original argument, and I would challenge the assumption that losing people is "backfiring". The church has a duty to preach what it believes to be the truth, rather than what all its members want to hear. Losing some members might not be a bad thing.
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And which itself inspired and gave permission and financial justification for many other inclusive games, indie to AAA, by proving there was a huge female audience for games, 14 years before Gamergate got it all wrong by attacking women while pretending it was about journalism.
So of course Gamergate didn't mean to be about The Sims, because The Sims totally undermines its claims. That's why they avoided mentioning or attacking The Sims, pretending it didn't exist and have millions of female players, and why you bristle and bluster and bullshit without evidence when I bring it up.
What receipts do you have to prove the brash claims of your Gamergate apologetics, to counter the design document receipts and first hand experience in the industry developing successful inclusive games popular with gays and girls and even boys, that I just shared?
This video essay by Alexander Avila is right on, and the comments are wonderful:
Did The Sims make you gay? - a video essay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk
>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...
>Absolutely unhinged.
Especially pathetic and revealing when they still try to argue it was "Ackchyually" about "unethical journalism". Yet look where we are today, and the streaming influencer "journalists" they follow.
The Sims wasn't just inclusive -- it was chock full of social commentary, from its simulation mechanics to its object descriptions to its storytelling support. What Ian Bogost calls "Procedural Rhetoric": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
>Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
>Bogost argues that games make strong claims about how the world works by the processes they embody. Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology. [...]
>Frasca mentions the simulation games SimCity and The Sims as examples of procedural rhetoric and uses the handling of same-sex relationships as an example: "[T]he way that The Sims's designers dealt with gay couples was not just through representation (for example, by allowing players to put gay banners on their yards), they also decided to build a rule about it. In this game, same-gender relationships are possible. ... By incorporating this rule, the designers are showing tolerance towards this sexual option."
If Gamergate were really about "ideology in games", The Sims should have been its ground zero central target, and they would have been attacking journalists who wrote about it positively. It wasn’t, and they weren't. That tells you their stated concern wasn't the real one. It was all about attacking and excluding women from day one.
Gamergate was a dry run for MAGA. It pioneered the same online tactics later used by the Trumpist right: coordinated harassment, grievance politics, memes, conspiracy theories, anti-"SJW" culture war framing, and the mobilization of angry online communities into a political movement.
Steve Bannon and Breitbart recognized its potential early, refined and amplified it, and used it to recruit and radicalize a generation of online activists who later flowed into MAGA politics.
Many researchers, journalists, and historians now describe Gamergate as a precursor or template for the alt-right, QAnon, and Trump-era online organizing.
Axios -- "How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers": https://www.axios.com/2022/10/20/gamergate-right-online-hara...
Encyclopædia Britannica -- Gamergate entry: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign ("Bannon and Yiannopoulos would use that platform to draw Gamergate supporters into the larger alt-right movement.")
WIRED -- "Gamergate's Aggrieved Men Still Haunt the Internet": https://www.wired.com/story/gamergates-aggrieved-men-still-h...
Poynter -- "Gamergate was a warning that the media failed to heed": https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2025/what-was-gamergate...
University of Melbourne -- "How the far right weaponised gamers and geek masculinity": https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-the-far-right-we...
ABC Australia — “Alt-right groups are targeting young video gamers”: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-15/alt-right-groups-vide...
Wikipedia summary with citations to books and reporting on Bannon, Breitbart, the alt-right, and MAGA connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
Today, the Likud regime recycles this same language specifically to foment racial violence in occupied territory, which should be sanctioned by America but isn't: https://www.jta.org/2026/05/14/israel/death-to-arabs-chanted...
Iran is not Arab and is not occupied by Israel.
In your second statement you seem to callout the behavior, yet you defend it in the first? Calling for the death of random societal/structural groups, be that entire countries/societies, ethnic group, etc, is unacceptable behavior. It is especially unacceptable when it is done by powerful political leaders. It is outright evil when it is done by religious leaders.
Somebody threatening to do something they are capable of is obviously quite different than somebody threatening something they cannot do.
Most of the people he encounters are super friendly, welcoming and willing to bend over backwards to help him out. It's genuine human connection and willingness. He will speak to people from every possible background, including people in the Taliban and honestly at the end of the day, we're all humans and most people respect that.
Things have become blurred with social media, digital life, closed and private nature of the modern world but if you take a step back, you can realize humans are typically, very helpful, friendly and unique characters.
They're not talking about the economic value of humans or even the psychological value of humans as subjects with experiences and a right to liberty or care or something. The idea they're trying to recall and reinvigorate is a sense of human value that transcends that temporal, material noise altogether and that is truly universal. It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed.
Now, you can make a well-developed case that that's hogwash and that the human value that matters is the one that alleviates suffering or grants liberty or even the one that grants material reward for some virtue or bloodline or whatever, but that's not what these guys are talking about. They mean a human nature that is always there and always worthy, just as much when it's experiencing temporal poverty/suffering/abuse as when it's basking in temporal wealth/success/freedom.
The idea is that Christian or not, Catholic or not, it does good for everyone to think of human value that way and the critique -- for a long time now -- is that for all the flash and glimmer of technology and its material benefits, it sometimes makes it very very easy to forget.
This sounds a lot like an appeal to democracy, yet it often seems that religion is at odds with democracy in our world. And given the choice between living in a religious society or a democratic one, I'd choose the democracy any day of the week. Not just for my own prosperity, but for the overall welfare of everybody.
The one thing that has heartened me about the new Pope is that he has spoken favorably about democracy.
= All life is precious =
For "life", you can read: any creature that potentially could be perceived as an individual that deserves a minimum of respect, a fair share of space/raw materials, not hurting, torturing or kill it without good reason, etc.
No need to go to extremes, but the above is imho a good starting point when considering the ethics on how to treat other creatures. Note that the question of whether something has a 'soul' or not, is not relevant there.
I'd be willing to consider including AI entities in that "life" category, if/when they cross that line between machine/tool and "creature with own personality, hopes, dreams, fears etc". Regardless of physical form.
Christianity and Catholicism doesn’t fool me. If you’ve ever wanted to see the mythical devil - look to those preaching and they legacy of hate that they carry.
But I don't know if that takes away from the idea itself and what fruitful counterpoint it might play in modern discourse.
Not true. Serfs had rights that varied a lot between societies and over time. Religions mostly teach a value of human life, and Christianity teaches equal value: "when Adam devlved and Eve span who was then the gentleman", or "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" or "it is easier for a rich map to pass through the eye of the needle".
There were all sorts of people in between. Free people who were not serfs. Skilled people who were members of guilds.
And "the Conqueror Worm" would make sure all of them faced the same afterlife treatment, whether they were buried in silks or naked in a pauper's grave.
And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands.
Ho, certainly they did.
The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of.
Nothing specific to nazis, look at Rwandan genocide. Hutu extremists systematically referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" and "snakes" in propaganda. Or even closer on a timeline perspective, Israeli leaders and media have used terms like "human animals" and described Gaza as a "city of evil" or a "nation of barbarians," while some Palestinian factions have used similar language against Israelis.
Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
> The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of.
It was not a disagreement about who is human. Nazi did not killed just Jews and foreigners. They killed and tortured plenty of fellow Aryans, because those were their political opponents or to create fear in others. When a nazi tortured Aryan German to get names out of him, he knew full well he is torturing a human. It was not about whether they are human or not, it was simply that human life had less value.
Using animals and insects as insults does not mean there was any confusion about whether those being mistreated are humans.
> Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
Actually believing they are not human is super rare and found only in some cults. Insults and degradations are how you work others to a rage, but they are not meant to be factual statements. And they are not interpreted as factual statements.
Happily, nazi left enough writing behind them, we know what they thought about human value.
Conflating the two is why some people have trouble understanding why religions like Buddhism and Christianity seemed to tolerate so much inequality and violence; or more generally just assumed people writ large were historically more callous and uncaring than today.
Arguably one of the downsides, though, to a focus on rights vs intrinsic value is that rights are typically couched in materialist terms. Most of the time that's probably for the better, but sometimes maybe not.
Whales show empathy towards their young, and towards humans.
Male "loner" lions have been known to show empathic protection toward human and antelope young in the bush.
It's increasingly hard to define a clear difference between Humans and "mere Animals"; empathy is emphatically not a clear difference.
To date, fear of vacuum cleaners may well be the only known difference.
No other species has been shown to systematically display non-kin, non-mating-system altruism (for which empathy is probably an integral component). It seems likely you need systematic non-kin altruism to achieve the ubiquitous, complex cooperation humans exhibit. And that complex cooperation is probably a prerequisite to make our degree of intelligence evolutionarily profitable. Otherwise human-level intelligence should be more common than our immediate lineage. (Some cousin species may very well have been smarter or more cooperative than us; relatively speaking it could be homo sapiens found a more effective equilibrium. Nonetheless our immediate lineage seems to be the only one to break through the selfish gene bottleneck that restricts other species along these axes.)
So far none of the AI stuff I've seen has really been about "the computer has no soul" and more around the danger that dehumanization can bring (which has been a refrain since the previous Leo, mind you).
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There's a reason why not a single country turning authoritarian in the last 50 years has been a representative parliamentary democracy. The last one has been Sri Lanka in the 70s. Not a single one since then.
Electing single individuals to power instead of parties and coalitions is a terrible idea.
They are all, and I want to emphasize all, presidential or semi presidential. From Belarus to the Philippines, from Russia to Nicaragua, from Turkey to Tunisia the list is entirely composed by presidential or semi presidential republics.
There are several reasons why this happens, and why it tends to kill pluralism and proper democracy with winner-takes-all mechanics (which also tends to aggregate people across very few/two parties).
Sri Lanka did not become authoritarian in the 70s. It did adopt a presidential system.
In 1971 the government declared an unlawful state of emergency that stayed in force for 6 years suspending civil liberties, suppressing press freedom and giving the executive wide powers. The constitution was updated, by the parliament, the same constitution prolonged the current government mandate for two years without elections.
What you're talking about are the events of 1978.
And, as you probably know, during the 80s, that presidential and authoritarian shift only got worse.
But my point stands, 1970s Sri Lanka, is still to date, the last parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian. Didn't cite this randomly.
I think we have different definition of authoritarian: yours is broader. Sri Lanka did continue to have elections and changes of government even at its worst, but I would only call it authoritarian in the period when there was clearly a lack of freedom of the press (when journalists risked being disappeared).
My definition strengthens your point as by that time Sri Lanka had a presidential system.
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From my outside perspective, Israel's leadership appears to have spent years deliberately conflating Judaism and Zionism.
Actually I may try that as a prompt. Last week I was having git commit messages all be in iambic tetrameter to see if anyone noticed but it annoyed me to death after the first two.
Now to look up “load-bearing” in Latin, just in case.
Presidents have their favorite past counterparts, so did emperors, and clearly the Pope does as well.
Does this kind of imitation prevent truly creative action taking? Did Akhenaten have someone in mind when he declared his own religion?
This is not merely a matter of "favorites" or "imitation" but one of legitimacy. Rome was not built in a day and so forth. Often the most successful paradigm-shifting leaders are ones who can deftly command the legitimacy of the past while adapting their society to a new future. But attempting the latter while disposing of the former usually fails, as in the case of Akhenaten.
At least they didn't pick Dario lest he burst in flames
It was me. Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that Chris Olah co-authored the encyclical with the Pope. I just found it noteworthy that there was someone from the “industry” at the encyclical presentation on May 25, which I think is a first. Usually, they are all clergy or academics.
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When the question asked is roughly of “can an AI ever be considered a human soul?”, there isn’t a philosopher alive whose individual opinion would be considered more meaningful than Pope Leo’s.
It’s unlikely that the church’s opinion would influence the future business choices of Anthropic. I think it still remains a positive business move to publicly engage with the church.
Saving distances, it's like Glock engaging with spiritual leaders to figure out when it's ethical to kill. This should not be their area of decision, and if it starts being so there is clearly a giant gap for the entities that should be leading this instead.
If what you say is right, I would challenge that by still insisting the corporations can only do what governments let them. You might say they run governments behind the scenes, to which I would say, who let them? They keep influencing elections? Then elections don't seem to be working, that's the root cause perhaps? In all the major political issues, that's the trend I'm seeing, democracy failing, but then I'll challenge myself and ask why is it failing?
The old sentiment of "if it can't be fixed, it isn't a problem" seems rampant. Modern democracy itself is a fix for some other sets of problems. In the US at least, it is in theory designed to be mended and fixed. Perhaps the real cause is lack of political will power by everyone pursuing politics, to even talk about changing the way the government is architectured, altering constitutions, talking about parting ways with land and population (secession), or incorporation of some. Perhaps the population just isn't that interested in educating themselves on matters of civics, therefore how democracy works needs a rewrite at its core?
Either way, I rambled on, i know, but it's with a point i hope is obvious: the common political sentiment around billionaires, corporations, oligarchs (or similar "woke" or "DEI" dogwhistles on the right) simply don't address root causes. They're reductive by design, not accident.
If private entities have as much power as the sum of common citizens to influence public opinion, policy, or the action of elected officials, then they overtake the system, whatever it is, however it's been designed.
An upper bound on individual power is then the only thing that maintains the system working.
-- Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
(Yeah, it’s a problem, but they can’t see it)
The Pope has already spoken quite a bit about ai, and exhorted priests to keep ai out of their homilies, which should be a sacred fruit of prayer and study.
Just from what I have seen he said and my Catholic Theological background, I would say he will definitely be talking about at least a couple things: 1) the relationship between ai and our intellectual labor, and how to use it fruitfully to grow without losing ourselves in it (a very similar concern to many on hn as far as I understand); and more importantly for him and again for many 2) how to use ai in society in a way that everybody can enjoy the fruits of it, instead of just the elite few (similar to the priority of Rerum novarum). This Pope chose his name because of this theme, and has consistently demonstrated that social justice is amongst his highest priority concerns - to the point that he has asked the Church to stop focusing so heavily on sexual ethics because there are such weighty injustices in the world that require our focused effort and attention.
For the shrinking Catholic church it's trying to regain relevance. For Anthropic it's PR.
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Some beliefs of Catholic faith are agreeable to American "conservatives" - "homosexuality bad, no abortion, no euthanasia". Others are music to the ears of American "liberals" - "help the poor and downtrodden, love the foreigner and everyone else, no capital punishment". But the church is the church. I don't see it as liberal or conservative. I suspect if you asked the pope, or cardinals or bishops, most would say the church is beyond such secular concerns and labels.
It has been around for far longer than any political movement or country. And I'd bet good money that it outlasts all of them.
> pushing views
A religious leader espousing religious views? Shocker.
> strongly opposed to Catholicism
Literally wrong. Only the Pope can tell you what Catholicism is. You can take it or leave it but that's how it is.
Ergo, some like St. Robert Bellarmine have argued for example if a pope were to teach heresy, he would immediately cease to be a pope; others have argued it impossible for a pope to ever teach heresy at all as this was something they believed God wouldn't allow.
So, if you were to see someone claiming to be pope and teaching error on infallible issues of faith and morals, you'd have to conclude logically they could not be a Catholic pope, from a Catholic standpoint.
> [the pope] poses as "conservative" while pushing views strongly opposed to Catholicism."
is a nonsense statement.
The Pope is Catholic and he preaches Catholicism. The Pope doesn't "pose" as anything. Some of what he preaches sounds conservative or liberal or whatever. That doesn't matter to him. What he promulgates was already ancient when any political movement of today was born.
The Catholic Church also does not teach that there cannot be restrictions on immigration, it simply says that we should treat people with dignity while enforcing such restrictions.
Again, what does that have to do with exploitation?
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What you describe as an appeal to democracy could also be described as a statement of Christian values. The idea that every individual matters and is loved by God is a core belief. There are some quotes in my other comments, but I think this is worth adding. https://biblehub.com/galatians/3-28.htm
The development of democracy may have been a reaction of religious people towards their own religions.
Granted there are only so many countries, so it would be hard to see a clear statistical picture. And it's complicated by the fact that religion may be secondary to democracy as a predictor of well-being. But I don't know of a country right now (or a region in the US) where the influence of religion on governance is a cause for optimism about the future of democracy.
Also, historically we would not have democracy as we know it without the moral framework of religious ideas. I am guessing you are American and the idea of separation of church and state can be traced back to a long line of development that started with "give to Caesar what is Caesar's". Even in the UK, despite the efforts of Henry VIII, state control of the church faded and we are a de facto secular democracy.
Yes, my examples and arguments are all Christian, but different religions have different values and histories so you cannot generalise across all of them and I am sticking to what I know. I also think taking a long term historical view makes it look a lot more positive. Have you read Dominion by Tom Holland?
Tell that to those were were protects by the influence of the Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_of_the_Indians
> Tell that to people in the inquisition.
Which inquisition? Do you by any chance mean the Spanish Inquisition? An agency of the Spanish government.
> Tell that to peoples in India and the east that were forcibly converted so that the pope could fill his coffers
Which people. There were Christians in India for 2,000 years. Some of my ancestors probably converted before the English did.
> Tell that to all the children murdered in Christian and catholic schools.
AFAIK these are mostly allegations that have never ben substantiated.
> Which people. There were Christians in India for 2,000 years. Some of my ancestors probably converted before the English did.
These Christians in India, who have been there for 2,000 years, are only the syrian christians or st thomas christians or malankara nasranis that follow eastern rite liturgies(syriac rites to be specific), and they all happen to be from the state of kerala or the malabar region only. The state itself has latin rite catholics as well as protestants which all started only since European colonial arrivals, though the syrian christians or st thomas christians or malankara nasranis are the majority of christians from that state. I am not trying to argue that all these people in India from european christianity(latin rite catholic and protestant) are forced converts or anything. Still, anytime this argument comes up, the syrian christians or st thomas christians or malankara nasranis are used as a shield, still, at the same time, in other cases, the community is also ridiculed as wrong christianity and the history of community as fake by the same people who use it as shield (the event of terming as wrong literally happened when portuguese came in the 15th century and force converted all to latin rite through synod of diamper which led to coonan cross oath leading to restoration of syriac litrugy but unfortunately permanently splitting the community into eastern catholics and orthodox denominations; even the british later came and tried to protestantise creating a small protestant faction also out the orthodox ones).
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Judaism I have nothing against as a religion. They don’t proselytize.
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Yeah, but they did loose the great emu war.
I would even argue that, for such a disrupting discovery, some sort of international approach should be considered - everything from monoply risks through energy usage to economical risks if massive unemployment is possible. We instead have private interests dealing with (or ignoring) these issues by themselves.
It's something that already misfired with the advent of social networks, where many of the current issues could have been avoided if the state had actually showed up to engage with the problem.
I tend to agree -- Even if I'm not sure what that quite looks like, and even if I'm not sure if that's better than what we already have.
“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
Nice WHATABOUT though?
The left is the problem and celebrating death. But with the king well, you merely don’t have to agree with everything he says.
The fact that I didn’t even need to say who made that quote yet you knew the author also shows me that you aren’t ignorant of the facts, just hyper partisan.
Assume it's true "the pope [appears to be] pushing views strongly opposed to Catholicism".
How does a Catholic interpret that situation?
(Hint: See maybe pope Paul IV's "Cum ex apostolatus officio"?)
According to who? It's a safe bet that a pope won't say "actually now you may covet your neighbor's wife" without a head injury or dementia being involved (in which case his staff would cover for him or he'd be retired somehow). That leaves questions of arcane doctrine that a regular Catholic simply isn't qualified to judge. They have the choice of leaving the church or staying and obeying as best they can.
The US is presently ruled by a overtly religious party that rejects church-state separation. Our President sells Bibles and prays in public with his cabinet. His party is supported by a predominantly religious electoral "base." And the influence of this system is not limited to one errant president, but has been systematically pursued for decades.
I hope that their ideas are distortions of true religious doctrine, but I can't prove it, and have no power to challenge them except in the voting booth.
I learned an alternate take on "give unto Caesar" which was that Caesar's money represented the wealth of this world, which is worthless compared to the infinite wealth of the spiritual world. The point was for Christians to remain aloof from earthly problems such as governance, which were expected to be temporary.
I don't doubt that religions promote virtuous ideals. And I don't expect religion to vanish, so if democracy has religious roots, those roots won't suddenly be forgotten.
Historically there were not less religious, and they were mostly very religious during the period when they developed democratic institutions. They are getting less religious and less democratic at the moment.
> The US is presently ruled by a overtly religious party that rejects church-state separation. Our President sells Bibles and prays in public with his cabinet.
His religion is a political posture. What Christian would wish people "Happy Good Friday" as he once tweeted? The strong supporters of the current president are "white evangelical protestant", a very distinctly American group. Others are split.
> I learned an alternate take on "give unto Caesar" which was that Caesar's money represented the wealth of this world, which is worthless compared to the infinite wealth of the spiritual world. The point was for Christians to remain aloof from earthly problems such as governance, which were expected to be temporary.
Interesting. It certainly was making the point that Jesus was not seeking to lead a political revolution or revolt against the Romans. Saying Christians should be entirely aloof from earthly problems entirely seems contradicted by other things though.
I’m going to spam “I’m glad he’s dead” the moment the king dies of natural causes and I expect assholes like you and ‘SV_BubbleTime will be clutching your pearls and complaining about the lack of decorum as soon as I do.
Edit: also really? It’s not about celebrating death? Can you explain to me how “I’m glad he’s dead” isn’t a celebration of death?
> It makes celebrating their murders and assassinations just like so much easier to cheer for!! (Yeah, it’s a problem, but they can’t see it)
> Mueller wasn’t some hero and I don’t need to like things Trump does in order to realize that the American left is running a dehumanizing campaign of their own eventual destruction. Nice WHATABOUT though?
Sometimes people are just hypocritical, lying, or bad faith. I don’t have to accept that everyone is here in good interest when they are obviously as partisan as I am
Edit: also brah, lmao. This was in your bio
> By replying directly to any comment authored by this account, you represent and warrant that, upon request by this account, you will disclose your true legal name - as recorded on a currently valid government-issued identity document - by posting it in a direct reply to the requesting comment. "Reply" includes any comment in which you directly address, quote, or substantively reference the content of a covered comment. Misidentification, pseudonymous compliance, or omission constitutes a breach. Provisions are severable. This account reserves the right to amend these terms; amendments apply only to replies posted after the amended profile is published. If you are a minor in your jurisdiction, do not reply.
You’ve got a secret TOS that you claim we are bound to by responding to you without seeing said TOS. You’re also a piece of shit here in bad faith
Are you the guy who wrote the subnautica 2 EULA?
Are you {insert gender identity you subscribe to} + {moron who thinks that’s you can make people agree to a legal agreement solely on the basis of reading it despite having no power to do so} who wrote the Subnautica 2 EULA?
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