Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between AI and human intelligence

> According to what definition of wrong? What is decided by popular vote?

According to what most people would consider wrong today. Supporting Mussolini. Interracial marriage. The right for gay people to exist.

(This is partly due to religion and the right having been allies in our modern history. So whenever there is a cultural clash where churches must take a position, it's usually with the conservative right. And the last century has been one where, on social issues, the conservative right has been wrong more than correct.)

> you know what Christians would say to this one... It's a lot of pain before it gets good

There is a lot of pain being caused by Christian institutions today. It’s why religiosity, particularly Christianity in America, is on a multigenerational slide [1]. (It could reverse. Young men, particularly on the far right, appear to be reversing course. And Christianity has thrived for millenia because it's particularly adaptable.)

We can learn from holy books and practice a faith without giving its institutions in the mortal realm power. Or at least, not putting them above reproach.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...

Not a Christian or follower of any organized religion but IMHO: Humanity (capital-H) is immortal; individual humans are not. Individuals are like the memory cells keeping the accumulated body of knowledge alive, and that body of knowledge is “God” or whatever, simultaneously human and spirit, an entire other world of Idea hosted in a distributed form in our physical reality.

It's like a DRAM refresh where new individuals are born, some bit of the accumulated knowledge gets passed on to them, the old individuals die off, but the knowledge is Eternal. In this sense, human love and reproduction literally makes more room for more Knowledge, and that's why the people who want to rule physical reality as a sort of false-god constantly try to convince us to have fewer humans, The Population Bomb, Maintain Humanity Under 500000000, etc.

> Which is taken from the Torah.

Proceeding to link to Wikipedia while claiming the Vatican took their opinions from the Torah especially since their references are an actual bibliography is very reductive.

The immortality of the soul is a Hellenistic belief that influenced Christianity.

Section headings: Embodiment — Relationality — Relationship with the truth — Stewardship of the world.

All of these topics (intentionally: §30) relate to weak points of the current "AI boom" in LLMs. Human-type intelligence — what we might better call "sentience" or "humanity" — critically depends on the human being's embodiment in the physical world and his relation to that world, including the recognition of other beings like oneself. Another point is a sense of responsibility toward the well-being of the physical world; that recognition of a sense of duty (or any non-material "higher truth" traditionally received by intuition or intellect rather than by reasoning) is what the writer turns out to mean by "Relationship with the truth." (LLMs obviously have no relationship even with mundane truth — historical accuracy, a sense of physical plausibility — but what the Vatican writers mean is the human mind's relationship to higher truths than mere physical data.)

§26: True humanity exercises "the full scope of one’s being: spiritual, cognitive, embodied, and relational." Current popular notions of "AI" deal only with the second of these, with the occasional experimental gesture toward the third.

§28–29: "Human intelligence possesses an essential contemplative dimension, an unselfish openness to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, beyond any utilitarian purpose." Paul Claudel (1956): "Intelligence is nothing without delight." Even Turing (1950) agrees: "[Some claim that no machine will ever] be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly [...] enjoy strawberries and cream [...] The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities." Where Turing disagrees is that he thinks that "possibly" some machine, in some perhaps-distant future, might truly experience enjoyment or delight. (Note: I don't know what Turing meant by "idiotic." Is he saying that a machine might someday experience enjoyment, but only a fool would think he could ever engineer such a machine — enjoyment would have to arise "emergently," so to speak?)

Turing (1950) was responding to Jefferson (1949)'s oration "The Mind of Mechanical Man,"[1] which I personally find much more coherent and more pleasant to read. (Turing's essay makes a more important contribution to the field, i.e., the Imitation Game; but I think Jefferson was more closely correct and exhibits better persuasive skill.) Jefferson veers slightly from his main thrusts to include the following two remarks. I think the first sentence remains apropos to the current age (also cf. §60, 88, 94), and the second obviously relates to the Vatican's interests as well:

> Since no thinking man can be unaware of his fellows and of the political scene he will find that the concept of thinking like machines lends itself to certain political dogmas inimical to man's happiness. Furthermore, it erodes religious beliefs that have been mainstays of social conduct and have brought happiness and serenity of mind to many.

§39: "Between a machine and a human being, only the latter is truly a moral agent — a subject of moral responsibility who exercises freedom in his or her decisions and accepts their consequences." Or as IBM (1979) put it: "A computer can never be held accountable; therefore a computer must never make a management decision." Or as Nietzsche (1887) put it: "To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise – is that not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind?"[2] §43–45 expand on this guidance in more concrete terms.

§112: Bernanos (1944) warns, "The danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give." Or as Juvenal (circa AD 100) put it: "The mob curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only: bread and circuses."[3]

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2050428/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality

[3] - https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/JuvenalSatir...