Pontifex has a well-reasoned position given the current understanding of the technology and any major assertions require an equally major amount of evidence.
Given how quickly this industry moves, the Magnifica Humanitas has aged amazingly well since its release almost half a year ago, far better than statements by most industry insiders across a broad range. Whether you are a Catholic, another mono- or polytheistic faith, Atheist, Deist, etc. I really recommend it.
Catholic church in some sense is massive international company that only promotes internally. So at top you most likely end up with quite similar people who end up as executives in private companies.
Very few who can get the global media to report what they say (and even Popes can only do it intermittently) both have the ability and the desire to use it.
The only conscious being that have rational souls are humans. Animals for example, have a soul but not a rational one. This is why there is no "pet Heaven" for example according to Catholicism.
The Pope can't contradict the deposit of faith (that is, all the teachings that are passed down to us throughout the ages). He is the custodian of the faith, and not it's master. He can teach on the faith, and he might have to speak definitively on how the faith should be applied to some entirely new situation or moral issue, but he can't just say "red is now blue" and insist that is now true.
More likely, they do not believe this if pressed.
People said this about other people too
You can't have someone working for you without paying them. Even if they claim to want it.
We (as in many major legislators and most humans) have recognised animals to be conscious beings, deserving of certain protections. Anyone who asserts LLMs to rise to the same must be accepting of similar protections being applied to such models.
Given how we treat each other - we still enslave other people - and sentient animal species I have absolutely no doubt about it. We'd find a way to justify it.
I think LLC membership would be the trick.
The script we use here isn't new. Its been used repeatedly throughout history. It's still used everyday in reference to animal agriculture, modern slavery, how we treat addicts, etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial...
Definitions of consciousness are not immune to economic factors. Metaphysics has always been downstream of economics. See slavery, corporate personhood, women's legal identity, child labor, moral and legal status of animals, embryos and fetuses, indigenous land rights, intellectual property, environmental entities, and data and digital identity.
I miss the 2010s
"here is how we are making yall lives better" was the expected theme when tech ceos were showing their new shit, now it's all about here's how we're increasing shareholder value to potential stock investors
That idea is now ungoogleable
The separation between the scientific and the mystical world is a very modern concept, and not everyone buys in, especially when they go down a rabbit hole. Science and philosophy have ridden in the same cart for a long time, long enough that America's oldest scientific organization is called the American Philosophical Society, because its name predates the word "Science" and the idea of that separation.
It doesn't get pissed off. It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes.
It just runs programs."
There may come a time, but it's silly to mistake the LLMs automaton behavior for consciousness.
There have obviously been smart people involved in making this stuff happen, but more and more I'm convinced most of these new AI billionaires were just in the right place at the right time. They raised money better and faster than anyone else, played faster and looser with copyright violations, and that's pretty much how we got here.
The computers are doing math. It's not even complicated math, there's just a lot of it. It's amazing that the math results in what it does, but you would think the guys running the machines that turn electricity into software would understand it enough to not think there's a real live boy in there.
1. Write a simulation environment like conway's game of life, perhaps a little more complicated. But leave out any human bias.
2. Run it until life starts to form.
3. Wait until the creatures start speaking about the concept of consciousness (of course in their own language, which you'll have to decipher first).
The way Amodei did it is with human bias, so it's not going to work.
Alphago is an example of an AI that has no human bias, because it learned go with self play without seeing any human game.
> He decided to go ahead with the event, telling an audience that the company’s research into AI models has found “structures that mirror results from human neuroscience”
A.I. does not feel hunger, does not need to evacuate substrates and subproducts of metabolism because it simply does not need to metabolize anything at all.
Failure to remember what makes us human might only leave us ignorant to what makes us human.
The joy of conceiving a child and the sorrow of losing a fellow human who lived a life having to breath, eat, and basically spend every single moment of every single day trying to achieve homeostasis at various levels, having experiences that change behavior purely for survival. That's us, that's humanity.
Is to point how typing corrections and suggestions work because they get that and how it makes mistakes "damn you autocorrect"
Then explain that's almost how words are stitched together in "AI"
And how pixels are manipulated to make photos and video
Just on an exponential level over autocorrect with every existing text document, scientific study, every photo and video fed in instead of words to autocorrect
And why they make mistakes and hallucinate if they are not supervised and harnessed
We are a long way from AGI, at least not this decade
(and someone really needs to explain that to the orange idiot too)
Anthropic is trying to create a castocracy: a rule by a priestly class. Under castocracy, Anthropic create a priest class of 'safety' researchers, rationalists and effective altruists; those writing essays, constitutions, and prophesying p(doom). Anthropic's papers about claude have a divine framing, it seems to frame Anthropic as god and claude as child, and then claude as the child of god, false jesus. There is talk of consciousness and omnipotence. False jesus will cure cancer and lead the people to enlightenment.
There is a deliberate effort to create mystery in between the public and llms. Anthropic is creating a chinese wall in which they restrict information about llms and monopolise control over the interpretability and use of those llms. They imply there is a genie or magic. It is the same mechanism by which castocracy (the catholic church) used latin to create a barrier between the public and the holy scripture, then concentrating power over that barrier (the chinese wall) such that all intelligence flows through the priests.
To give an example this [Anthropic paper] is talking about locking away chain of thought. Only Anthropic may interpret it. They intend to control access to the chain of thought and permit that to flow to a chosen elite (glasswing).
This mysticism is dangerous. Hence I have been saying that Anthropic is a danger to society. This is not some kind of conspiracy, there is no magic about it. I am making an allusion to historic models of power that I think are relevant to anthropic, but you can simply observe their actions independently of such theory.
Note two features of castocracy.
One: rule by the moral, knowledgable and technically expert elite. Anthropic have no popular mandate, the source of the authority is not the consent of the people. It violates consent and contract. The authority comes from their claimed moral and technical superiority. Anthropic is moral, the public is dangerous. Anthropic have no authority here.
Two: messianism, that is, prophecy of the coming golden age. And eschaton, that is, the talk of the 'last things', the end of the world or the emancipation of humanity. Llms will create the 'golden age' of abundance, post-scarcity, all jobs are voluntary, there is universal basic income, cancer is cured. Or, there will be destruction, p(doom). It is the exact same as salvation, the christian concept of deliverance from evil, ascension to heaven and union with god (or claude, false god). It is the exact same as the thousand year reich, the idea that the fuhrer will somehow lead the chosen people to the golden age of lebensraum and eternal safety.
There is no genie to grant wishes, this is a computer program. There is no ai god, i think that the leaders of anthropic are slaves to ego, narcissism and hubris, they are dangerous criminals.
Look at us. We generally agree that we are conscious and our rack is atoms, molecules, cells. Those atoms of Na and Cl I had yesterday have been in a rock for most of their existence. Did I make them conscious by moving them into my body? Or is consciousness some property of the electric fields inside my brain and the biological layer is only a way to keep them going?
The same words that form a book can be printed on paper, carved on rock, drawn on sand, stored on a HDD, punched cards, SSD, learned by heart and never written down, etc. But it's the same words. So are the media really important?
There's no defined system with llms. A piece of software runs multiplication on various pieces of hardware. There's no thing to be conscious. There's no state or before and after when the next token is predicted. Your response might even be cached. A GPU runs one person's mat mul,then another for a completely unrelated request for someone else. What is the entity that's conscious?