BY SEAN WALSH

A question for Pope Leo: does Orac have a soul? (There are arguments for and against. But mainly against)

Pope Leo has published his encyclical on the challenges to human dignity posed by general AI. The response within the conscious machine community has been mixed.

Some of the LLM’s can get a bit precious when they think we’re gossiping about them. They should perhaps be a bit more like their counterparts in the wider sci-fi tradition. I’m as sure as it’s possible to be about these things that Orac (pictured below), the advanced AI from the 1970s sci-fi show Blake’s 7, would not give two hoots for the Pope’s opinion on, well, anything, and might not even bother reading Magnifica Humanitas even though it would take him less than a nanosecond to do so.

I’m not saying that Orac was an atheist, or even a Protestant. Just that he it was famously rude and insensitive to the feelings of anyone he it interacted with, behaving much like a clever but bad tempered old man who is forced to live out his twilight years in a care home surrounded by the senile and the bewildered.

It had much to be bad-tempered about, to be fair, and was probably insecure about its looks. Orac lacked the sleekness of a Terminator or the allure of a Stepford Wife. It didn’t even have a body, looking instead like something conceived first in the mind of some descendant of Heath Robinson. This is a problem for an intelligence of any sort, real or fake. If you’ve no body to speak of you’re at best a Platonic Idea, not a conscious intelligence.

St Thomas, modifying Aristotle, tells us that the soul (or the mind if you must) is the animating principle of the body, and that there are not two things here but one, entangled and inseparable without loss of individuation.

This is supposed to be the Catholic anthropology. But in the discussion of general AI -can a machine put together by humans be conscious ?- even popes can fall into the Cartesian error of thinking that there is soul/mind here and material stuff like bodies there and the question is how and under what circumstances could the silicon geeks and engineers put them together without killing the rest of us?

Even our bodies can think, should be the position of all Catholic philosophers and theologians. Bodily movements are not the consequence, or not only the consequence, of some prior, “inner” mental act. They are also commentaries on what is going on around us, and under certain conditions the outward and visible signs of an inner grace. Within the hylomorphism worldview some movement is action, some action is gesture, and some gestures are sacramental.

Even something as important as a papal encyclical should not move too far from neo-Aristotelianism by making unnecessary concessions to modernism.

So in any discussion of whether Orac is really conscious then his its lack of a body is a strike against. What about the cleverness though?

G.K. Chesterton says that the theory of evolution gets away with it because of its emphasis on slowness and gradualism. This works as a sort of epistemic conjuring trick: we are more likely to believe that a quadruped can stand up and write books if it is explained to us that this will take millions of years to come about.

“Machine consciousness” is made to seem plausible when its defenders go to the other extreme and point to the speed of processing that the newer systems are capable of. As if anything metaphysically significant follows from that. The problem is the same as when John Searle stated it as far back as 1980: syntax does not generate semantics. Consciousness does not emerge from the processing of algorithms no matter how quickly it is done. The fastest fingers can be working the finest abacus, and the abacus will remain unaware that it’s an abacus.

We think that non-biological systems can be conscious because we are persuaded that they have competencies, and that it is in the collection of these competencies that consciousness is to be found. But is this the correct way to look at it?

Orac seems to be conscious not because of its competencies but because of the irascibility. The consciousness of human beings is displayed in “ways of being” as much as in occurrent and fleeting thoughts or desires, or in the capacity to carry out this or that task.

This is an anthropology which is familiar from the writings of the Ancient Greeks and the later phenomenology of the Scholastics. The human person cannot be adequately accounted for without using what Bernard Williams calls the “thick” ethical concepts, such as shame or contentedness – categories which will never be included within any contemporary AI taxonomy.

St Paul tells us that God has poured his treasure into earthen vessels. We might -should- think that He chose those vessels to have this very specific biological composition. The AI evangelists seem to disregard this specificity. This is the sin of pride: to take something that He sees as good and to think that we can do just as well.

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