Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magnifica Humanitas

vatican.va

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

931–940 of 1001 posts

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#931

Post by cynicalpeace »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #887
panza wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for other denominations, but in Catholic philosophy, it's not so much a case of whether it attains consciousness (whatever that may mean now or in the future), but whether it has a soul. From that perspective, no, machines cannot be baptized, nor can they be Christians, and Jesus cannot save them (because they are not fallen).

Interesting. Did Neanderthals have souls? We know we interbred with them. The question is then whether earlier hominids also had souls. Was "ensoulment" a gradual phenomenon or did it arise spontaneously? If it was gradual does it mean at some point there was a "cross-over" period where we interbred with soulless hominids? Interbreeding becomes philosophically awkward if ensouled and non-ensouled beings could mate an…

This is what's called "Majoring in the Minors" in Christianity. Neanderthals are no longer around. What's important is treating humans with a special dignity. If you start equating humans with anything else, like plants or animals, you get nihilism at best, and atrocities at worst.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#932

Post by threethirtytwo »

jimbokun wrote: post #926
threethirtytwo wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know the LLM can be similar because we train it on data from us as well. We also know the LLM can be different, but we also know humans are different too. Examples like psychopaths tells us how different humans can be. It’s all black boxes.

This is dumb. The way a psychopath’s brain works will be far more similar to another human brain than an LLM will.

Right so you prefer psychopaths over LLMs to make the decision? Be real. How similar it is, is irrelevant.

You're STILL wrong on the black box argument. Humans are still black boxes. And btw, you said this is "dumb" what you're really implying is that * I * am dumb. But look very hard at the logic in your argument. I think it's categorically factual that the only dumbass here is actually you. I'm not gonna hide this behind some "This is dumb" passive aggressive bullshit. YOU are dumb.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#933

Post by mjh2539 »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #887
panza wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for other denominations, but in Catholic philosophy, it's not so much a case of whether it attains consciousness (whatever that may mean now or in the future), but whether it has a soul. From that perspective, no, machines cannot be baptized, nor can they be Christians, and Jesus cannot save them (because they are not fallen).

Interesting. Did Neanderthals have souls? We know we interbred with them. The question is then whether earlier hominids also had souls. Was "ensoulment" a gradual phenomenon or did it arise spontaneously? If it was gradual does it mean at some point there was a "cross-over" period where we interbred with soulless hominids? Interbreeding becomes philosophically awkward if ensouled and non-ensouled beings could mate an…

All living things have souls. For most Ur-Platonists (which includes nearly all orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, and pagan Greek and Roman philosophers/theologians until the Enlightenment), the soul is:

* what makes a thing what it is (it's form/eidos/essence/universal/nature)

* what makes a thing a living thing at all

* what unifies and coheres the many disparate parts of a living thing

The relevant difference between those of us with human natures and those beings who lacked human natures is that our human nature (i.e. our souls) has the power to come to know universals/natures/forms themselves (albeit imperfectly), whereas other beings do not. For a dog, their senses are acquainted with many instances of cats, but they never are able to go from these individual sense impressions to the form/nature/universal of cat, or ficus carica, or what have you.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#934

Post by mjh2539 »

OrangeMusic wrote: post #844
ziotom78 wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that what we can reasonably expect in the future is machines that act as if they experience consciousness. But the fact that this is true consciousness is highly debatable, as the thought experiment of the Chinese room [1] explains. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Not sure if it's really "highly debatable" that an entity that appears conscious is therefore conscious. The Chinese room thought experiment is obviously flawed to me. It's not the "computer" that is conscious, it's the running software.

The point of the Chinese room is to show you that the guy who has memorized the standard responses to various questions in Chinese does not in fact know Chinese. He's mindlessly parroting things.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#935

Post by mjh2539 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #742
ttfkam wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not known for deep understanding of high technology? The Catholic Church was behind the scientific discovery of The Big Bang through the Catholic priest (and astrophysicist) Lamaître. Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar. Steno, a Catholic bishop, formulated the foundational principles of stratigraphy, establishing geology as a formal science. Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spect…

> Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spectroscopy and the first to establish that the Sun is a star, creating the first stellar classification system. Amazing. Building on the work of Galileo I see. How was Galileo received by the church yet?

The problem with Galileo is that he did not yet have good enough evidence to assert what he was asserting (even though what he was asserting turned out to be true).

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#936

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

jvanderbot wrote: post #925
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hammer is not alive. You are the one who called LLM "alive" and used the word "enslavement". The logic "it is our creation" does not mean we get to abuse and enslave it. Even with animals that we don't consider sentient we generally agree that unnecessary cruelty is bad and we usually tolerate cruelty only if it is a threat or a source of food (basic necessity) which LLM is not. If you believe it is 100% not alive…

You have to read one comment above mine to find a statement about how they may someday become more than simple tools. Let me quote it: > The pope treats them exclusively as lifeless tools, and while I think that this is most likely true for current LLMs, we should think more about the limit of what is going to happen in the next 20 years than being overly focused on the current capability level. To me it seems rather…

I react to your ethical position and logic.

Saying that it's OK to enslave and mistreat some living thing because we enslave and mistreat others (animals, in the past humans). For sure mistreatment of animals is a BIG issue and the main acceptable justification is human survival, because they're threats or food. Applying this logic to something that is not threat and not food is flat out wrong.

> My statement is that, no matter what, they should _at most_ qualify as domesticated labor animals

Outright cruelty to horses is taboo in many places and even horse racing is controversial.

Of course if it's a fully mechanical tool then there's no concept of slavery or cruelty. But we are morally obligated to do our best to find out if it's more than a tool. The article makes a point that we have no consensus how it works and whether it's truly just a tool. It definitely behaves like a human, and we all usually agree that human deserves rights to live and be free and such, without them we suffer and it dehumanizes whoever takes them away. But in any case, if there's a chance it's not just a tool, even if it's at animal level, we shouldn't just say "even if it's alive it's fine to enslave it because it's for sure no better than an animal and we have a history of animal abuse already"

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#937

Post by overfeed »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #904
overfeed wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. Firearms and explosives are not abused nearly as much as one would have imagined before their invention (or soon after). I don't think it's because we stunted the explosives tech-tree, but the social…

But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person. There's civilian, everyday task that would be easier were better firearms and explosives available

> But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person

I see you don't have any hunting enthusiasts in your social circles. Fireworks are explosives.

If your point was to suggest that regular people don't have access to firearms and explosives, then I'd have to vehemently disagree.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#938

Post by svieira »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #742
ttfkam wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not known for deep understanding of high technology? The Catholic Church was behind the scientific discovery of The Big Bang through the Catholic priest (and astrophysicist) Lamaître. Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar. Steno, a Catholic bishop, formulated the foundational principles of stratigraphy, establishing geology as a formal science. Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spect…

> Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spectroscopy and the first to establish that the Sun is a star, creating the first stellar classification system. Amazing. Building on the work of Galileo I see. How was Galileo received by the church yet?

Well, he was an honored guest of the Pope for a while. Then he made fun of his host in a published book while claiming that he had a proof when he just had a theory and was told to please stop claiming that his theory required a change in theological interpretations of the book of Joshua (but he might continue teaching his theory about terrestrial movements without claiming that they were necessarily true).

https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-galileo-controversy

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#939

Post by svieira »

irdc wrote: post #533
ricardobeat wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you can take any writing by american TV priests as gospel

Sure, another source then: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/20/8078979/pope-francis-trans-rig... I just cannot reconcile the idea of personhood being valuable with reducing humans to mere biology.

Humans are not "reduced" to biology. Their biology is presumed to "reveal" something about their personhood. And no matter how they feel about their hair, their hips, their eyes, etc. they ought to receive them as a gift from God and enter into a dialog with Him about how they ought to make use of the gifts He has given them.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#940

Post by aaarrm »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #650

I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the…

I heard that when cars were becoming popular, some scandanavian country had lots of protests about how dangerous they were and that they were successful. I don't remember the desired outcome though
Post reply on HN