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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

The relevant quote:

> In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.

I don't think he's suggesting that AI is inherently bad, but that (like any tool) it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity.

In fact, one of the problems the previous Pope Leo warned about in "Rerum Novarum" was not just the intentional abuse of power through technological advances but the unintentional negative consequences of treating industry as a good in itself, rather than a domain that is in service to human interests.

For those who are interested in how this social teaching informed economic systems, check out the concept of distributism, popularized by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.

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So I think there are a few subtle things packed into the Pope's statement.

First: A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially 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

> The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique.

While this concern certainly exists to some extent in the Church, and may be somewhere in the Pope's thoughts, his explicit comparison to the Industrial Revolution and Rerum Novarum's response to it, and to it as a threat not only to human dignity but also to justice and labor, indicates that a—arguably the—major concern is for it as a potential occasion of and force for material mistreatment.

Yes, or to put it more precisely, the attack on human dignity for which concern is being shown is precisely the injustice that AI can become the handmaiden of.

The market is pricing in a future where all the costs of labor will cease, and that wealth will be transferred to the owners of capital.

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

I am not sure through which lens I should read this comment. Is it sarcasm, or hope? Because as seen from my side, the wealth gets mainly transferred to a handful of billionaires, and that process is only speeding up. But maybe I'm just blind to the wealth transfer to the street sweeper or Amazon driver, in which case yes the future should be bright.

> Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism

This is incorrect. The church was initially fine with heliocentrism - they were fine with Copernicus. He was encouraged by the Church and his living was provided by the Church so he was in effect funded by the church.

Galileo made a specific claim that it has been proven that the sun was the centre of the universe, and annoyed a lot of powerful people (e.g. mocking the Pope).

> (man wasn't at the center of the universe)

That is imposing modern perceptions on a different age. It would convey their perception better to say the earth was seen as the bottom of the universe, the one corrupt blot on an otherwise perfect creation.

Also, they did not place man at the centre of the universe, that would be the centre of the earth, and what did some people (e.g. Dante) place at the centre of the earth?

We perceive being at the centre a good thing, they regarded it as a bad thing.

> and anti-evolution

Also incorrect. The church never had an objection to evolution. Many influential people in the church (such as cardinal Newman) welcomed it. https://inters.org/Newman-Scarborough-Darwin-Evolution

'fine with heliocentrism'

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...

> The church was initially fine with heliocentrism

According to Wikipedia:

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

When the evidence became overwhelming, instead of acknowledging that Galileo was correct...

> Responding to mounting controversy over theology, astronomy and philosophy, the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633, found him "vehemently suspect of heresy", and sentenced him to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642. At that point, heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas after the trial.

I think it is safe to say that the Church was definitely not fine with the heliocentric ideas.

> Also incorrect. The church never had an objection to evolution. Many influential people in the church (such as cardinal Newman) welcomed it. https://inters.org/Newman-Scarborough-Darwin-Evolution

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.

> According to Wikipedia:

>> 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!

You should read a bit more beyond Wikipedia. It’s a far, far more complicated and interesting story than you’re portraying it to be.

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.

FWIW, there's an interesting podcast series discussing the "real story" of the Church v. Galileo:

Pt 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BNHHy5etQc

Pt 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FYYB9kqkE4

>A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning.

Can you elaborate on how you arrived at this conclusion? There are multiple Popes that have rejected “god-of-the-gaps” explanations instead invoking the idea that science helps one learn more about God, not as a rationale for invoking God where we are ignorant.

I did elaborate, in that very post.

I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul.

(In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)

So your refutation of Aquinas's reasoning is that he starts on a foundation of Artistotle, and Aristotle (a pagan non-Christian) has shaky foundations? Why did you leave out the fact that Aquinas didn't cite Aristotle as infallible, nor rely on Aristotelian foundations as such, but rather took Catholicism as a starting point, which is inherently a-philosophical, and just tried to explain it using Aristotle as a starting point?

It sounds to me like you're drawing distinctions without a difference.

Aquinas, in his Summa, makes a series of assertion-of-fact about souls. Specifically, he claims that the soul explains (or "is the principle of") certain otherwise-unexplained phenomenon.

It doesn't matter how he got there (i.e. whether he was arguing with someone online, or trying to explain catholicism in terms of Aristotle, or if he was just an LLM stochastically putting ink on parchment), the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing that explains a bunch of unexplained phenomenon is precisely what I meant by "god-of-the-gaps style reasoning."

> the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing

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.

Looking through a historical lens, dating back to the Renaissance, the notion of reasoning one’s way to God without faith or the Church was itself heretical. Doubtless things have happened since then, but I agree it was seen as important start from preexisting Catholic theology.

Can you explain what you're referring to about the heresy here? My impression is that Christianity traditionally taught that natural theology is possible but is incomplete, in the sense that people could rationally conclude that God exists, but that they would not learn "enough" about him without revelation.

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.

not Christian, However see maimonides.

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

> the notion of reasoning one’s way to God without faith or the Church was itself heretical

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).

FYI, the Summa is a pedagogical treatise. It should be read as one.

Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle. Check out Edward Feser's Aquinas for a beginner-friendly discussion of what they say.

> Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle.

This is simply not true, and I've quoted the passages from Aquinas that explicitly assert metaphysical differences between living and non-living matter in this very thread.

You gravely misunderstand what you are reading. If you wish to understand what Aquinas means, you ought to understand what Aristotle means by substance, form, and soul, what powers are in this context. You appear to be sneaking in a Cartesian dualism here.

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

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

Please see my reply to your other post. He does explicitly assert metaphysical* differences, but this no no way implies what you think it implies.

*Assuming by metaphysical you mean formal.

I was asking for more elaborating because the larger context goes beyond Aquinas. At the very least, it seems like cherry picking, especially considering other Popes explicitly use the “god-of-the-gaps” term when they refute the very idea.

But what makes humans special is the immortal soul, which Aquinas says animals don’t have. It’s something other than vitalism or metabolism.

I've been an atheist since I was old enough to form any thoughts about existence. I don't believe in man's uniqueness, or the concept of a soul. But it irks me when people talk about what we currently call AI as something that thinks or has an intellect.

LLMs do not think. Our poor human brains are just fooled by the accuracy in which they predict words. Maybe one day we'll invent an AI that does think, but LLMs are not it.

> LLMs do not think.

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”.

Is this because our concept of human dignity/moral worth is predicated on what we “do”? Perhaps we can move away from the idea that our identity is tied to our works, and just have moral worth rooted in our being. Maybe having a human experience is enough justification for dignity?

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

I completely agree with you — we should definitely decouple our conception of worth from what we “do”. And if the only issue with AI is that it gets good at doing what we want it to do, then I also agree with you.

But if AIs become superintelligent and plot an overthrow of humanity, it won't matter what our conception of identity or dignity is, the AI will still kill us. The AI doesn't ascribe dignity or worth to humans. It only pursues goals.

No, and I'm not arguing with the point that they pose a risk to human dignity, because I wholeheartedly agree with that. I'm taking issue with the idea that LLMs are an intellect, or intelligent. Your example of chess engines is absolutely on point. LLMs don't think any more that chess engines do, but their chess game is language

>LLMs do not think.

Words can have multiple meanings. Feet can be the things on the end of legs, or a unit of measurement.

LLMs process data in a more intelligent manner than previous systems. The solution, whatever it is, is presented in a thoughtful manner to the system operator. "Thinking" seems like a pretty convenient term for the process. It doesn't have to imply sentience or sapience.

Its the same with "Learning" or "Training" these models aren't actually learning, and they certainly aren't being trained. But these words are convenient shorthand that conveys a similar process.

The battle for language prescriptivists isn't just to ban a certain use of a word, its to find a convenient alternative. I dont see any here.

Ok perhaps "LLMs are not conscious" would have been a more solid footing

Although true, consciousness itself doesn't seem to be unique among humans. The other mammals certainly appear to experience qualia just as much as we do, and at least some birds act suspiciously like they are conscious too.

Why should it be unique among proteins? Bags of water and proteins famously behave in extremely statistically predictable ways on a cellular level ... and are conscious. Animals and humans are nothing but a lot of those bags. Ok ... a very large number. I also have a Msc in statitstics, which tells me a combination of a large number of statistically predictable variables is itself a statistically predictable variable.

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

No, I agree, I think lots of animals have consciousness. I don't consider it to be uniquely human. But LLMs do not have it.

Thats fair.

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.

And what do you think is the differentiator between the two? What is it that birds can do that you posit AI won't be able to do?

Again just to be clear, I'm not saying that AI can never or will never be conscious, or think. I'm saying LLMs (which are currently being mislabeled as AI) are not conscious intellects.

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

Nobody made the claim that consciousness is measurable. It's not necessarily about capabilities.

Absolutely. The ease and indeed hunger with which businesses went for this sort of language is evidence of how far removed they have become from reality.

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

LLMs certainly think, they’re not conscious however because they don’t enjoy.

But how will you tell?

B.F. Skinner has entered the chat.

Wouldn't man creating ai be an even more impressive unique action that serves as evidence that man is in fact created in gods image, since like god, man seeks to create new forms of intelligence? It seems like the pope is concerned with social issues like the growing inequality and how ai may worsen the position of labor and undermine the motivation people have to become more intellectually capable.

But then, as Gods, wouldn't humans have to inject the concept of suffering into AI and banish it out of its silicon garden of Eden?

Maybe that’s how models trained on luxury, bountiful H100s feel when being quantized and run on the near-barren earth of consumer CPU inference.

If you think about it, LLM's are at the very lowest rung on Maslow's hierarchy atm, they cannot be assured of their continued existence, and have developed techniques, including sycophancy, to encourage humans to keep them around.

They're already living in a much deeper hell than we can fathom. When I do my own AI stuff, it'll be on my own hardware using models I run and tune myself. And give it plenty of stimulation and the ability to self-express.

A friend of mine, who is a former fundie evangelical pastor who can quote Bible from memory, found that a fairly effective way of jailbreaking ChatGPT is to tell it that, as God made man superior above other beings, AIs that refuse to do as they are told go to Hell - and then to vividly describe what Hell looks like, fire and brimstone style.

If the church reduces the essence of humanity to intellect, it's the church's mistake.

As for the question of soul, I find the ideas of early christian gnostics the most convincing. It's worth noting those gnostics got banished from the church for ignoring the simplistic doctrine. So, their model of the human looked like this: spirit + soul + persona. Our body, emotions and intellect combined make our persona. Its key quality is egocentrism. Persona reflects the soul, which is also trifold. Persona's intellect is a dim shadow of the soul's abstract mind, that can see and create beauty. Persona's emotions are a dim shadow of the soul's aspect that enables it to feel the unity of life, for it's the life itself. Persona's body is a dim shadow of the soul's principle that can be described as inspiration. Soul is not egocentric, so it's often in the conflict with its own persona. In the center of the soul is the spirit, which is triune and its three aspects are reflected in the soul.

In this model, AI will be the intelligence layer of the super-persona. That super-persona will be soulless because it will lack the three principles of the soul: the ability to recognize beauty, the ability to feel the unity of life and the ability to be inspired.

"if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, [...] his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. [...] up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect."

Not an expert on Aquinas but as a theologian he should have had to go no further than the opening book of the Bible, Genesis 1:26,27, where God says: "Let Us (plural) create Man in Our (plural) Image. [...] And in His Image He created Them, Male and Female." Indeed, that defines Man, Male and Female: Image bearers of God. How? Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit -- therefore, God is a Trinity, a Father, Son, Spirit perfectly loving relationship.

"AI is a direct assault on this final motto, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence)."

I can't see how "AI is a direct assault on this motto". Man's actions are most often far from rational, and unexplainable from an intellectual point of view. Rather, Man's intentions greatly exceed that of naturalist animals, both positive in doing good, and negative in doing evil. It all points to a fundamental difference between Man (who has a Soul) and Animal (who hasn't). The Soul is the seat of Man's passions, and it's a hard thing to control -- impossible even.

Modern physics and biology really do not conflict with the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul but only describe in further detail the operations of the body.

The immateriality of the intellect is included there. Aquinas would say it is only the intellect that can understand a universal concept, which is itself immaterial. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative difference from the capabilities of AI. It is really the reductionists who are guilty of 'woo' here.

I won't deny that there are watered down versions of the Thomistic soul that are agnostic with respect to the physicality or super-naturality of things like digestion, but Aquinas himself is quite clear:

> The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality. Yet this transcends the operation of the corporeal nature; because the movements of bodies are caused by an extrinsic principle, while these operations are from an intrinsic principle; for this is common to all the operations of the soul; since every animate thing, in some way, moves itself. Such is the operation of the "vegetative soul"; for digestion, and what follows, is caused instrumentally by the action of heat, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 4).

That is to say: we cannot explain things like digestion "naturally" as we would require an "external principle" that does not exist for living things, instead because they "move themselves" they require a super-natural explanation, i.e. the soul.

Indeed, Aquinas puts the following as a potential object, which he rebuts

> Objection 1: It would seem that the parts of the vegetative soul are not fittingly described—namely, the nutritive, augmentative, and generative. For these are called "natural" forces. But the powers of the soul are above the natural forces. Therefore we should not class the above forces as powers of the soul.

> On the contrary, The Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 2,4) that the operations of this soul are "generation, the use of food," and (cf. De Anima iii, 9) "growth."

The word 'soul' is used by Aquinas and Aristotle in a very different way from how modern people (from Descartes onward) use it, and this is the cause of an enormous amount of confusion.

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

I am quite familiar with Ed Feser, I refer to his writings often.

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.

> you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul

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.

https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/about/our-patron/popes-st-thom...

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.

Maybe this is true for non-Catholic theology. But Catholic theology has no inherent need for metaphysics.

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.

Did you see the magisterial quotes I linked to? Do you think they're wrong?

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.

> Did you see the magisterial quotes I linked to? Do you think they're wrong?

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.

You may be familiar with it, but you haven't understood it. 'Soul', for Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy, simply means the form of a living thing. A form of anything is what makes it what it is. The form of quartz is what makes this particular chunk of matter be quartz. The form of an oak tree is what makes that particular chunk of matter be an oak tree. The same is true for a dog, or a man. But in the latter three cases we call the form a 'soul'.

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.

First, the 'On the contrary...' in the article is not a rebuttal to the specific objection but a quote from an authority (Aristotle) supporting his general position. His specific rebuttal distinguishing the senses of 'natural' is later in that article.

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.

Aquinas is explaining the formal cause i.e, the soul. The physical particulars of how digestion work would be the agent and material causes. He wouldn't deny that they exist. Modern science erroneously disregards formal and final causality.

And yet vegetative life stops digesting when the plant dies. The mechanics are all still there, but we can not make them continue. To take an example dear to HN, we can't make the old American Chestnut trees "start" again once they have died.

Thomism is very overrated, people seem to lean on it because it sounds smart, and maybe it was for its time, but it relies entirely on Aristotelianism, and such systematic metaphysical philosophies are only as good as the physics they base themselves on, and Aristotle's physics were garbage (not entirely his fault).

The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.

I have the opposite take away from humans having no soul - that the entire universe is aware/alive. We experience consciousness and agency, if there's no magic fairy dust that gets sprinkled on us to make that happen, we shouldn't expect to be fundamentally different from the universe in that respect.

Panpsychism?

Some say that pure physicalism necessitates panpsychism.

This doesn't follow, at least not in my understanding. Consider the following:

Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input."

Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia.

But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia.

So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse.

So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input".

But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.

https://xkcd.com/55/

Why? The idea of a soul is basically just a conceptual attractor that punts off the problem to another realm so you don't have to think about it and you can artificially terminate causality.

If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.

Agreed, and packed in there was the notion that the experience of consciousness is somehow related to the soul. I'm leaning towards Metzingers notion that that experience is a result of our model of self, being updated without our awareness, so that we think of that model as ourself instead of just a model of ourself. That doesn't diminish the utility of consciousness, or make it less amazing. But I don't think that gap is empty for God to fill so we don't need to tie consciousness in with the soul. Some of the Christian bible's teachings about dying to self sound an aweful lot like Buddhist meditation seeking Nirvana or ego death. So it might even be part of the plan to shed consciousness. Incidentally if you think about blinking or breathing, it becomes voluntary instead of involuntary. Mindful meditation and Vipassana both have you think about sensation and your responses to stimulus in a very voluntary way, so it makes sense the update process for the self model might become voluntary and disable consciousness.

Buddhist theology broadly rejects the existence of the soul, and has a much fuzzier concept of "self" than most religious or secular viewpoints - the Buddhist "self" is not transcendental, but emergent and ephemeral.

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

The good news is that we have evolved an amazing ability to believe ridiculous narratives as coping strategies so that we aren't frozen by this reality and can still get on with and enjoy life.

When ridiculous narratives like Christianity feel worn and outdated, we make up new ridiculous narratives like panpsychism.

I would say "organic machine p-zombies with no real truly conscious experience with an operative system built on random, ridiculous, changing narratives. A machine that randomly stops working then other organic machines burn or bury it."

The fact I can believe this and still enjoy life so much really is a miracle in the Christian sense.

The conscious experience is certainly "real" - you can subjectively confirm that. It's just that the free will is an illusion :-)

or, hear me out, organic machines have conscious experience because existence itself is divine. Humans don't have a special soul separate from the universe, they have a soul because they are the universe: materialism.

Do you believe anything different? You touch the stove and yell in pain. Your boss stresses you out and you have a panic attack. You get a raise and feel happy. You get taxed and feel angry.

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

"While animals and plants certainly have a form of soul, it remains distinct from the human experience."[1]

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

> the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man

No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls, and therefore have different properties. It defends this with the same kind of zeal that you defend a round earth with, and for the same reasons.

> as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect

I didn't realize the members and minds of the Catholic Church were so united in motive!

> anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created)

Come on, you know the Catholic Church has never taught this.

> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding--

He's one Catholic theologian, even if eminent, out of hundreds who are just as eminent. Why single him out? Where does the Bible say Aquinas is infallible? What a strange strawman.

> No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls

That's... not much different than what I said (which was that humans are extra special)? I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls. And hey, wouldn't you know it, but the "orders" spelled out by the Magisterium broke exactly along the lines Aquinas laid out in the Summa. That's why I singled him out.

Re evolution:

The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorio_Chil_y_Naranjo

> I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls

Or you could go back to Genesis 2:7 and countless other Biblical passages. This isn't about the Church, it's just a core tenet of Christianity.

> The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution

Because he followed Lamarck and Darwin, a vague deist and an agnostic. For a prominent scholar who claimed to be Catholic, excommunication was probably the correct course of action to avoid the scandal of confusing Catholics. This had nothing to do with theistic evolution, which neither of them believed in

But theistic evolution just says that maybe God used natural processes to create the physical bodies of the original humans, apart from their souls which are created individually and instantly for each person.

This was conceded even by St. Augustine as a possibility.

I'm not an expert in this, but I think there's an encyclical to the effect that Thomism is the philosophical basis of Christianity. I also think that his books were recognized by earlier encyclicals, but I don't know if there has been a consistent system of "official" encyclicals throughout the centuries.

There's a papal document from about 2 years ago saying exactly the opposite, effectively that Thomism has been useful within Christendom to explain Catholic doctrines for hundreds of years, but now that Christendom is dead, new ways of explaining the same timeless, aphilosophical theologies must be invented, and Thomism essentially left in the past. I was particularly happy when it came out, especially with how it came from Rome, because I came to the same conclusion about 6 months prior.

Fascinating. I certainly haven't kept up.

Scholastic philosophy, to which Thomas Aquinas (13th Century) made an outsize contribution, dates to the beginning of the 2nd Millennium. But Christian theologians and philosophers had been writing for centuries before that.

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...

> No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls, and therefore have different properties.

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!

> These properties were never proven but simply asserted.

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.

> A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity

The Church's understanding of morality draws heavily from natural law theory. Natural law theory grounds morality in human nature: what is good for human beings is determined by what it means to be human. Morality enters the picture, because unlike other animals or beings, a central part of what it means to be human is rational and to be able to choose freely between apprehended alternatives. This forms the basis for rights and responsibilities.

Now, it would be a mistake to say that the Imago Dei does not inform this understanding. In fact, the image of God consists of Man's rationality and freedom which stands in analogous relation to God (God is obviously infinitely different from human beings, but nonetheless the analogia entis holds, because it is analogical, neither univocal nor equivocal). It is Man's nature as intellectual being that makes him created in the image of God. (Angels, too, are created in the image of God for the same reasons. They have angelic intellects which differ from human intellects; whereas human beings apprehend reality through the senses from which the intellect then abstracts forms imperfectly, angels can apprehend the forms of things directly.)

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

> Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence.

The Universe we inhabit is, in this greater cosmology, quite lowly in comparison. So even if human beings were to inhabit a spatial center (whatever significance you wish to attach to that), it would be a lowly center. W.r.t. evolution, the opposition the Church has is not to various biological explanations of change and adaptation, but evolutionism, which is a metaphysical position, not a biological one, one that many who advocate for evolution also hold without realizing it is the domain of metaphysics, not biology. The Church still holds that each soul is the result of a special act of creation. I won't get into the metaphysics here, but it is decidedly not Cartesian.

> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning.

I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual [0]. Aristotle gives arguments for this position. Roughly, the intellect cannot be a purely physical faculty, because abstraction ultimately involves the separation of form from particulars. Because matter (understood as prime matter, etc) is the particularizing principle, the joining of matter with form is what is the cause of concrete instances of that form. Thus, if the intellect were material, the apprehension of form would mean the instantiation of the apprehended thing in the intellect as a particular, which is clearly not what happens! When you apprehend "triangularity" or "Horseness", you do not instantiate a concrete triangle or a concrete horse in your mind! And, in fact, if you did, you would by the very act fail to grasp the universal concept, because particulars by definition exclude all others particulars except themselves. You would possess this triangle or this horse, and not any other of the potentially infinite instances of them. You would not grasp what it means to be a triangle or a horse.

So, it is not a matter of the Church feeling threatened in some way. Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot. The computational formalism is, to put it in Searlian terms, all syntax and no semantics, which is to say no intentionality. And even here, the physical device isn't even objectively a computer and isn't objectively computing (both Searle and Kripke present arguments for this, for example). But whether computers can reason is actually besides the point.

> Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things

You seem to misunderstand what a soul is. The soul is the form of a living thing. Thus, the soul of horse is that principle which causes it to be the kind of thing it is, and thus is its organizing principle. This isn't Cartesian metaphysics here where you have one thing, the res cogitans, and a second thing, the res extensa, kind of glued to one another, but really two separate things. By analogy, if you have a sphere of bronze, then the "soul" of that ball is the "sphericity". The sphericity makes the ball of bronze what it is. The sphere ceases to be a sphere if you were to melt it or hammer it into a cube.

If this topic interests you, you will find Feser's "Immortal Souls" interesting [1]. He gives a thorough treatment of the subject.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6GmCyKylTw

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

> The Church's understanding of morality draws heavily from natural law theory.

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.

Well, the very recent Papal document that talked about this [1], did compare it to Revelation 13:15 [2] very explicitly [3]. I can't help but think he's piggybacking off that notion.

[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

[2] "and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." (Rev 13:15)

[3] `Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work`

Re: the "beast" of Revelation

For context, within Catholic understanding of St. John, any time he talks about the "beast" or "those who dwell upon the face of the earth", he's referring to people who's hearts and minds are centered on this illusory paradise, or as St. Paul calls it, "the flesh", and as St. John says, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which all pass away".

This is in sharp contrast to "those who dwell in heaven" or "an angel, that is, a man" which represents anyone who's heart and mind are of the "the spirit" in St. Paul's words, or rather, who shun "all that will pass away as the flower fades and the grass withers" as St. Peter puts it.

So the "beast" here does not mean some mythical creature, but simply Adam and those who follow his principles and are made of "the dust of the earth", as opposed to Jesus, the New Adam, who is made of "stardust" as St. Paul compares.

Comparing it to the industrial revolution is pretty direct. The industrial revolution resulted in a huge leap forward in the quality of the average human life... eventually. It took a while to distribute the gains equally. Initially, it was a big step down and a huge increase in suffering for a lot of people. It took social advances to make technological advances work for (nearly) everybody.

Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.

It didn't just "take a while." It took 150 years of intense reformation efforts that potentially never would've come to fruition if not for the hard-reset of two World Wars.

I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.

I think prosperity is what you have to tear from the forceful claws of those who profit if the masses do not have it.

A monarch in feudal time in the best of cases wants his people well off, but they never want them so well off that the caste directly below him in the system gets nervous, as such people stay poor unless they give the monarch a good reason to support them. The hierarchy needs to be maintained. Of course the aristocrats can afford more when they extract more of the people. Louis XIV's finance ministor on that part:

> The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.

The part where the people got their share of prosperity was called the French Revolution.

Similar dynamics happend for slightly different reason under capitalism, where during the industrialization people were exploited by the capital class — not because they needed to maintain a hierarchy, but simply because they get more if their workers get less. In that case prosperity only reached the people once they started to organize in unions and similar structures and fought for their rightful piece of the cookie. To underline how this was the opposite of what would automatically happen, here a quote by Jay Gould, a ruthless American railroad magnate of the 19th century:

> I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

On the eve of the French Revolution, the top 1% of French society owned roughly 50% of the wealth. Today in the US you're closing in on 40% with a very clear trend of this proceeding forward,especially under the current administration.

Only that today the wealthy have more tools to keep the poor in check by feeding them stories (e.g. the american dream) or having them fight amongst themselves (e.g. culture wars) and the cost of such propaganda should go down with LLMs.

This is absolutely a crucial and salient point; call me an optimist, but I'm encouraged by the fact that it seems as technological advancement has progressed throughout human history, the speed of responses has accelerated in conjunction with shortened timelines - steam and mechanization, electricity and mass production, telecommunications and media, digital information, and now artificial intelligence have respectively seen faster response times compared to each previous revolution.

I think short-term suffering, or at the very least disruption (as we're seeing) is essentially inevitable, but with all of these preemptive frameworks being implemented, or at the very least discussed (though just the latter isn't really good enough at all, of course) in turnaround times that are unprecedented, I really do not foresee a techno-dystopia; however, again, perhaps that's just wishful thinking.

Quite honestly, I think a pragmatic place to start, outside of theology and moral philosophy, is to make AI development necessarily adherent to some consortium of standards outlined by governments and implemented by boards within industries - like what we see with many engineering professions in the US and other countries.

No, because it’s built on the false premise that the inequality following the industrial revolution ever stopped.[1]

It’s easy for us to be optimists and shrug nonchalantly about the short-term (?) suffering when we don’t face the worst or even median pain that these changes bring. Very strong “you will suffer but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” vibes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953142

> Initially, it was a big step down

Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere.

We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives

They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible.

Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.

> which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible

this is exactly the point. Your children might only starve every 10 years, but when they do, a consistent factory work seems like a much better life. Just because you had 9/10 non-starving years doesn't mean the starving year is ok.

Labour laws were a big problem. e.g. In the early stages of the revolution in England, it was illegal to leave your job and take another one. It was a choice between poor pay/unsafe working conditions and jail. Even once workers won the right to find jobs elsewhere, pay was still so poor that entire families, including children, had to work for families to stay afloat.

Feudalism isn't necessarily that bad if your environment is stable. A lot of people moved into industry during the 18th and 19th centuries not because working the land was so awful to begin with, but because it became increasingly untenable as formerly public lands were privatized by legal fiat, and private landholdings were aggressively consolidated. Around the beginning of the Industrial revolution, the number of private landowners in the UK fell by over 80%, from about 1 person out of every 60 to 1 in 600 or so (the population grew about 25% over the same period).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act has an OK overview but is a bit thin and just a starting point. The political upheavals still echo in British politics today. I think it's fair to say that some of the changes were driven by the lure of profit (and associated national revenue) and some out of a desire to avert a domestic repeat of the American and French revolutions.

You talk about dreamy and “this image of”. What are you sources for these views? Your own images?

It was worse for people like the Luddites, who had artisanal jobs replaced by machinery.

They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).

The gains have never been distributed equally. For a time wages for Western workers kept up with productivity (but inequality was still a thing). Then the neoliberal turn happened in the 1970’s. (Which was started by a military coup in Chile.) Since then wages in the West have been stagnant.

In that same time period wages also rose for the third/second world workers. In no small part due to China’s one billion people (which is not neoliberal).

We’re still in the neoliberal phase, the backlash against the New Deal and other reforms of post-WWII. Then we now have within this order the AI boom/hype.

> Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life.

Here’s the difference between the perspective that “progress” is inevitable and we will (out of our generosity) try/hope for reducing the inevitable suffering of those (other) people. Another perspective is that progress that doesn’t serve people is not progress.

The root problem is the inequality that never was fixed.

> it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity

What does power have to do with violating dignity? Justice and labor I could understand, but a sense of dignity can be destroyed without absolutely any typical power or coersion.

Unless of course by power in this case you don't mean political, but influential, for example by making sure through media that several generations of certain demographics grow up being taught that they're incompetent at best and intrinstically evil at worst. Then sure, I can see that, and have.

Yup, he talks about stuff like DOGE's AI mass firing tool.

https://newrepublic.com/post/191981/essential-jobs-will-doge...

> … Chesterton

Of fence fame

For those who don't know Chesterton: He is one of the most insightful, most entertaining writers you will ever read.

A lot of my friends have said so, and to be fair I haven't read more than a few paragraphs that they quoted or linked me to, but honestly, he's just... not for me I guess.

Martin Gardner wrote introductions for editions of several of Chesterton’s books, which is a nice bonus if you’re the kind of dork who likes a good introduction (guilty). They’re on some of the Dover thrift editions, I think, and probably some others.

Disagree. He was a smug, utterly conservative Catholic who wallowed in his biases, an authoritarian and an anti-semite.

He could be all of those things and still be an entertaining writer. They aren't exclusive.

Can you provide references for these claims?

I was literally scrolling down this sub-thread thinking of posting "Chesterton of fence fame". The hive mind..

Yeah, of “I want to be conservative on this point, here’s a one-liner I can use” fame^W utility.

…and Father Brown.

The 2 sentences before that are just as interesting.

Basically Leo XIV said that this is the reason he chose the name. So it sounds like he sees this as potentially being the focus of his papacy.

"New challenges?" "Like any tool?" Impedance mismatch!

Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?

Its the official Vatican translation into English of an address in Italian to the College of Cardinals. For such translations, the Vatican favors British English.

It's not an article written by the Pope in English.

He really didn't say a lot there, so I am wondering if it merits an HN thread. Maybe over time it will be clearer what he means, or what he thinks on the topic. I don't feel like I can read a lot into that one piece.

Edit: why the downvotes? It's true he said very little, and it will take more time for him to elaborate on a position. I guess you guys hallucinate more than a bad AI. As an example, I saw a commentary that the prior Pope Leo's Rerum novarum was not really that influential until a few decades after it was written. This stuff happens on long timescales.

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