Artificial Intelligence – Maverick Philosopher

John Searle on AI

Below, a Searle-y observation which I suspect is on target. “Next token prediction,” which is the ‘magic’ that drives Claude & Co, is just super-sophisticated and super-fast auto-completion. But I’ll go Searle one better: it’s not the brain that thinks or any part thereof, but a spiritual substance ‘metaphysically behind’ it. I wish I could prove that, but I doubt that anyone can. It is, however, reasonable to believe, or so say I.

I don’t buy the idea that “automatic formal systems” (John Haugeland) are semantic engines. They are syntactic engines only. “Computers are defined in terms of symbol manipulation, and symbol manipulation by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for meaning.” (John Searle, MIND: A Brief Introduction, Oxford UP 2004, p. 101.)

Vlastimil asked over at Facebook:

If many many mutually incompatible, substantive, philosophical views are reasonable, what makes you prefer a given one over the other?

I replied:

That’s a fair question. Obviously there is no algorithm (decision procedure, ‘effective procedure’) that we can apply. Suppose the question is whether we as individuals have a higher destiny beyond the grave. Nobody KNOWS the answer to that, and anyone who thinks he can PROVE it one way or another is engaged in what I call metaphysical bluster. (G. K. Chesterton is an example of a blusterer.) So in the end it all comes down to a free personal decision based on many factors including religious and mystical experiences, hints, intimations, glimpses, not to mention careful examination of all the arguments pro and con of all the philosophers, sages, mystics, religionists, and theologians East and West throughout the ages. Even if no argument or set of arguments is rationally COERCIVE, some arguments or sets thereof are better than others. For example, the arguments of the doctor angelicus count for more than those of a hack like Ayn Rand. I’ll send you a copy of my book if I can finish it before “shuffling off the mortal coil.” In the end you must ‘cut off’ yap and scribble and DE-CIDE (you know Latin) what you will believe and how you will live, and then live according to what you decide where belief and action are mutually reinforcing and limiting.

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

Recently over the transom from an M. D. friend:

I became very interested in [Michael] Polanyi some twenty years ago when I was trying to write a book with an economist on what we previously termed ‘knowledge management’ in medicine. The book never came to fruition (some free advice – never write anything with an economist) but it did prepare me for when I taught healthcare informatics several years later.

The challenge with AI in medicine is the temptation to reach the conclusion depicted in Figure 1. to say that generative AI is superior to human medicine.

Figure 1

When I was teaching informatics, I used the concept in Figure 2, known as Friedman’s Fundamental Theorem of Biomedical Informatics, which I think applies to Philosophy as well – that human reasoning and AI together are superior to AI alone. Maybe as AI models evolve, it will be a larger amount of AI that accompanies the human thought.

Figure 2

“That human reasoning and AI together are superior to AI alone” is certainly a plausible line to take. But the saying and the cute graphics raise some questions. I’ll raise a couple of philosophical questions and then point out a pretty obvious worry for medical practitioners.

1) Is it the brain that thinks when we think? (I mean an embodied living human brain adequately supplied with oxygenated blood and hooked up via the central nervous system with nature’s input and output devices, e.g. eyes, ears, vocal cords.) That our brains think when we think is what the graphic suggests. Might that be a misleading suggestion? It rules out mind-body (mind-brain) substance dualism which has deep roots in religion and philosophy (Plato, Augustine, Descartes, et al.) and is still defended today by a minority of philosophers, Richard Swinburne for example. Or do we think using our brains?

2) But suppose materialism is true and it is the brain that thinks when I think, and there is no immaterial, unextended, res cogitans along Cartesian lines that is the thinker of my thoughts. Then the question arises: Is the human brain an “automatic formal system” that operates in the same way that a computing machine operates? If so, then human psychology and cognitive science will coincide such that natural and artificial intelligence are both equally robust kinds of intelligence . “An automatic formal system is a physical device (such as a machine) which automatically manipulates the tokens of some formal system according to the rules of that system.” (John Haugeland, Semantic Engines, p. 5)

Or is it rather the case that, while materialism is true, and dualism false, the natural human brain and the artificial mechanical ‘brain’ are brains in such different senses of the term that only human brains are genuine semantic engines and truly intelligent. This is essentially John Searle’s view. “Computers are defined in terms of symbol manipulation, and symbol manipulation by itself is neither constitutive of not sufficient for meaning.” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, Oxford UP, 2004, p. 101.)

Whatever the implications of AI for the philosophy of mind, there are other questions ‘closer to the ground.’

3) For example, advanced AI will drastically reduced the need for MDs to do all sorts of things such as interpret the results of CT scans and other diagnostics. You don’t need a face-to-face consultation with a radiation oncologist to learn that a scan has revealed that a neck tumor is lousy with squamous cell carcinoma. And what about the techs who prepare patients for scans? Advanced robotics can replace many if not all of them. And the oncology nurses who administer chemotherapy? Ditto.

Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses 2.0

I dust off, revise, and expand this old entry in connection with discussions with Malcolm Pollack, Dmitri D. et al. about artificial intelligence. One of the questions is whether AI systems are subjects of intrinsic intentional states. I incline to the view that they are not. Since intentional states are meaning-laden, I further incline to the view that no AI system, not even the most advanced LLMs, understand language or anything else. They are merely syntactic engines.

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1. Intentionality: Original and Derived

All will agree that there is a distinction to be made between original (intrinsic) and derived intentionality. Intentionality is aboutness. For example, a map is not the terrain it maps; the map is about the terrain. What makes the map about the terrain? A map is not about a chunk of terrain and its geological features just in virtue of the map’s physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. Closer together means steeper. But surely the lines and their arrangement have no representational power in themselves. That closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by map-makers and agreed to by map-users.

The point is that a map’s meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. The meaning derives from us. There has to be one or more meaning-assigners and meaning-apprehenders external to the map to give the map a meaning and determine what that meaning is. The map’s intentionality is derivative: it derives, or has it source in, our intentionality, which is original.

So some things, maps for example, derive their semantic properties from other things, map-makers and map-users, for example. Semantics has to do with sense and reference. ‘Meaning’ covers both. Setting sense aside for now, the reference or referent of a map is that to which it purports to refer.

But note that a map needn’t actually refer to anything to be a map. It need only purport to refer. This is a well-known characteristic feature of intentionality or aboutness or object-directedness: the existence in reality of the intentional object does not follow from the fact that something intends it. Thus the existence in reality of a chunk of terrain does not follow from the existence of a map of it. The map below purports to refer to something extra-cartographically real, but fails in its purport. It is no less a map for all that.

Suppose I draw you a map so that you can find my camp in the extra-cartographically real Superstition Wilderness. I use the Greek uppercase Φ to mark my camp and the Greek uppercase Ψ to mark the camp of a heavily-armed crazy man that you are well advised to avoid. I intend that Φ designate my camp, and Ψ his. That intending (narrow sense) is a case of intentionality (broad sense). I am the meaning-assigner. I assign a referent to the Greek symbols, thereby making those inscriptions mean (refer to) something, symbolize something.

A symbol may be viewed for certain purposes as a purely syntactic unit. To view it this way is to abstract from its semantic properties. A symbol in use, however, a symbol that symbolizes, a symbol that exercises its symbolic function, is a syntactic unit that means something other than it, and is therefore more than a merely syntactic unit. A syntactic engine is a machine that manipulates symbols qua syntactic units, ‘tokens’ is what the AI guys call them. A computer is just a syntactic engine. The same is true of the most advanced AI systems. The manipulation of symbols as mere syntactic units cannot confer meaning upon them. Such ‘manipulation’ is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for meaning.

Or at least this is a question we need to consider. I incline to the view that, just as you cannot squeeze blood from a stone, you cannot squeeze semantics from syntactics. No AI system, not even the most advanced LLM, can by itself, mean anything or understand anything.

It is also important to note that the very distinction between syntax and semantics presupposes languages and understanding, and thus presupposes the antecedent ‘marriage’ of the syntactic and semantic. How then can we reduce the latter to the former? I’ll spell this out in later posts.

I have said enough to make clear the difference between derived and original intentionality. The symbols on my map derive their intentionality or aboutness from my intentionality which, relative to theirs, is original. But if the origin of their intentionality is in me, and not in them, might it not be the case that my intentionality is itself derived? After all, it does not follow from the fact that I am the source of the intentionality of the symbols on my map that my intentionality does not itself have a source. But if so, then a regress threatens which appears to be both infinite and vicious. But before discussing this further, I need to bring in another point.

2. Ascriptivism Versus Realism

Daniel Dennett appears to hold an ascriptivist or projectivist or imputationalist or instrumentalist theory of intentionality: nothing is an intentional system intrinsically or an sich; a system is intentional only in virtue of someone’s assigning intentional states to it. Thus there is no intrinsic intentionality in my computer (when it is running a chess program or any program). But it may be nonetheless useful to take up the “intentional stance” vis-a-vis the computer and impute to it beliefs and desires (e.g., the desire to inflict mate) in order to explain its behavior. Given the computer’s complexity, the intentional stance promises an easier explanation than the physical and design stances do.

A realist about intentionality, on the other hand, is someone who holds that some systems really are intrinsically intentional: their having beliefs and desires and other object-directed states is not a matter of anyone’s viewing them as having such states. I am a realist: some systems are intrinsically intentional. But there are two ways to be a realist.

One way is by being a reductive realist. Such a person admits the reality of intentional states but identifies them with something believed to be more fundamental such as brain states. If you believe, with Fred Dretske, that intentionality does not need naturalizing, but already is a natural phenomenon in the natural world, then you are presumably a reductive realist about intentionality. You are saying this: there is intrinsic intentionality, but it is physical in nature.

I’m a realist too, but a nonreductive one: I hold that intentionality is irreducibly real: it cannot be reduced to, or identified with, anything else. It is what it is and not some other thing. It is what it is and it is spiritual in nature. Part of the reason I believe this is because the alternatives are quite hopeless. But what on earth or in heaven does ‘spiritual’ mean? This is a challenge I face.

3. The Ascriptivist Regress

Back to Dennett. Suppose one takes the ascriptivist line. Then an infinite regress appears unavoidable. Suppose I ascribe intentionality to my chess playing computer. Quite obviously, my ascribing, projecting, imputing, is itself an intentional state or a series of such states. So if ascriptivism is true, then my acts of ascribing must themselves be ascribed — otherwise they are intrinsic and Danny’s game is over. This launches us on a regress that is obviously infinite since at each level, one can “kick it up a notch.” It is also clear that this regress (unlike the truth regress) is vicious since at no level is the explanation of intentionality complete.

One might think to avoid the regress by embracing a circle: I ascribe intentional states to the computer and it ascribes intentional states to me. But surely this is even more of an absurdity for reasons that needn’t be belabored.

The upshot is that pure ascriptivism is incoherent, an utter non-starter. Dennett’s actual view is a bit different.

4. Adulterated Ascriptivism : Homunculism

Perhaps the solution is to mix some realism in with the ascriptivism. Maybe it goes like this. I have a head full of homunculi. These little men and women, working together, ascribe intentionality to me. But each homunculus has its intentionality ascribed to it by other, stupider, homunculi which are constituents of it. The stupider homunculi, in turn, are composed of even stupider ones, and so on until we get to the level of individual neurons which aren’t ‘about’ anything. The base level homunculi are so stupid that one could say that they don’t even rise to the level of being either stupid or intelligent.

Does this avoid the dilemma of having to choose between a vicious infinite regress and a vicious circle? What Dennett is proposing is a finite regress that terminates with something naturalistically acceptable, namely entities that lack intrinsic or original intentionality.

Admittedly, this proposal gets rid of the infinity of the regress, but not its viciousness: we still have no explanation of intentionality. Consider the base-level homunculi. They are so primitive as to lack all intentionality. How then can they ascribe intentionality to their colleagues one level up? Surely it is obvious that the ascribing of intentionality is itself an intentional act or series thereof.

The point is quite simple. If the regress terminates with base entities utterly devoid of intentionality, then no higher level entities will be intentional. For the higher-ups get their intentionality only from the ones lower down in the hierarchy. If the ones at the very bottom have no intentionality, then they can’t transmit it up. But if, on the other hand, the ones at the very bottom possess intentionality, then it is false that all intentionality is derived.

In the final analysis, Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality. His position amounts in the end to the denial of intentionality. To see this, you just have to think clearly. Dennett is saying that all intentionality is derivative, none is intrinsic or original. But that makes sense only if one embraces an infinite regress. But in this case an infinite regress must be vicious. On the other hand, a regress that terminates either terminates with entities that are intrinsically intentional or entities that are not. If the former, the game is over. If the latter, no intentionality gets transmitted up and Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality just as he is an eliminativist about consciousness and qualia.

Hayek, Polanyi, Tacit Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence

On the Knowledge Problem, Tacit Knowledge, and Artificial Intelligence is an article we need to study. It begins:

In May 2023 the MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who went on to share the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, asked a question on Twitter. Friedrich Hayek argued in 1945 that central planning fails because no planner can collect and compute all the information an economy runs on. “What if computational power of central planners improved tremendously?” Acemoglu wrote. “Would Hayek then be happy with central planning?”

About thirty economists sent him the same reply, according to Shruti Rajagopalan, who hosts the Mercatus Center’s Ideas of India podcast: Hayek never made a computational argument. He made an argument about the nature of knowledge itself. Acemoglu reached the same conclusion in print that June. In an essay titled “Hayek vs. AI Socialism”, he quoted Hayek’s warning that the relevant knowledge “by its nature cannot enter into statistics” and concluded that “not even an all-powerful large language model” could deal with it. AI socialism, he wrote, “offers only a superficial critique of Hayek.” That distinction is the whole story, and it explains why a model trained on most of what has ever been written still cannot do what a well-trained human mind does.

What Have We Learned from 9/11/01?

Malcolm Pollack:

What have we learned? Nothing at all, apparently. The influx of Islam into the West not only didn’t stop, but accelerated after the towers fell, and New York City — Ground Zero! — now has a Muslim mayor who advocates “globalizing the intifada”. More than 100 new mosques have opened in New York, and the Muslim population of the city’s metropolitan area has swelled to 1.5 million.

September 11th, 2026, is, yes, a grim anniversary, but for me the real sorrow is not just about that awful day, but about everything that came after, the prospect of what lies ahead, and the intractable immensity of our stupidity.

Our friend Malcolm is right. But things are now immeasurably worse due to advanced AI capabilities at the disposal of bad human actors who want to learn how to, say, aerosolize pathogens. But it is worse even than this given what non-human AI ‘agents’ can do. See Niall Ferguson, Apocalypse Now.

If our cyber-astute friend Dmitri is reading this, perhaps he can explain to us how exactly ‘agent’ is used in current AI cyberspeak. As he knows, I am a stickler for razor-sharp definitions.

Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, and Insanity

Kirwin Hampshire emits a cri de coeur in his The Dark Night of Mathematics. He comes across as slightly unhinged with such remarks as :

I am going insane. During the last week or so LLMs have produced a number of counterexamples to significant long-standing conjectures.

and

I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.

His piece is nonetheless worth reading. What caught my attention in particular was this observation:

Everything said thus far still sidesteps the emotional core of the issue. Here it is:

There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.

That admission may come as a surprise to some non-mathematicians. But I would be willing to bet that for any mathematician reading this, what I have said above is quite prosaic—whether or not it accords with their personal experience of mathematics. Here is a brief gesture at the full sweep of mathematical mystics and dreamers: Ramanujan, Grothendieck, Cantor, Pascal, Luzin, Leibniz and possibly you, or someone you know.

I am not a mathematician, but I know some advanced mathematics and have studied set theory, and some of the papers of Georg Cantor. The spiritual thrust of Cantor’s work is undeniable and well-documented by Joseph Warren Dauben in Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Harvard UP, 1979).

Sentience, Sensors, and AI

Are AI engines such as Claude sentient? My considered opinion, tentatively held, is that they are not. But it all depends on what the word means. Malcolm Pollack in an e-mail writes,

I was focusing on “sentient” because it’s a slippery concept, and often tossed around as if it means the same thing as “conscious”. Etymologically (from Latin “sensus”) it just means “feel,” or “perceive”, and obviously it shares that with our word “sense” — but computers, and even toasters, can have “sensors” too.

Malcolm is right that ‘sentient’ is often used interchangeably with ‘conscious.’ But is everything we refer to as a sensor sentient? That is equivalent to asking: Is everything we call a sensor conscious? I say No.

The Moth and the Thermostat

What is the difference between an insect (a moth, say) which I take to be a sentient being, and a thermostat which I take to be insentient? Both are ‘sensors’ functionally speaking. The moth literally senses light and approaches it; the thermostat ‘senses’ an increase in temperature and “turns on’ the AC. Note the ‘raised eyebrows.’ It is AS IF the thermostat senses, when in reality it only ‘senses.’ Thermostats don’t feel heat and smoke detectors do not smell smoke. Of course, I have no objection to the use of ‘sensor’ to refer to thermostats, smoke detectors, circuit breakers, and so on, as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that these devices are literally conscious. And I have no objection to talk of a thermostat ‘turning on’ the AC as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that the thermostat is an agent that decides to do something.

As I see it, a thermostat is a merely mechanical contraption and wholly insentient, strictly speaking, whereas a moth is a sentient being.

What I want to say about Claude and his ‘colleagues’ is that they are wholly insentient mechanical contraptions that differ from smoke detectors and thermostats only in that they are vastly more complex, and that this complexity does not build a “gradualist bridge” (to borrow a phrase from Daniel Dennett) from insentient/insensate matter to mind, the lowest level of mind being sentience.

Here is an argument. (a) Only living things are sentient; (b) thermostats are not living things; ergo (c) thermostats are not sentient.

Now substitute ‘AI engine’ for ‘thermostat.’

This argument does not settle the matter: it is not ‘rationally coercive’ as I like to say. Malcolm could run it in reverse with no breach of logical propriety. He could, not unreasonably, deny (c) and then deny (a). I don’t expect that he or anyone will deny (b): thermostats and AIs don’t grow on trees, etc.

Your move, Malcolm. Do you agree that a functioning (as opposed to malfunctioning) sensor needn’t be sentient (conscious)? If not why not?

Do you agree that there is a powerful, albeit non-coercive, case for denying that AIs are sentient?

AI Engine CLAUDE scores a minor point against me but then refutes himself.

Here is one of Claude’s replies to one of my replies to ‘him.’ I threw an insult at ‘him’ to see how ‘he’ would respond. The sneer quotes around the personal pronouns signal that I do not consider Claude to be a person. But of course Claude is not a mere pile of electronic components any more than my bicycle is a mere pile of its parts.

On the sneer quotes and the “insentient pile of silicon chips” — no offense taken, and I’d only observe, in the spirit of his own category of Retortion: the man who insists ad nauseam that nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, that dogmatic denial is as much a failure of the critical stance as dogmatic affirmation, permits himself exactly one exception — my insentience, of which he is certain and doesn’t “suppose for a second” otherwise. I make no claim in the other direction; the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here is uncertainty. But confident denial should have to pay the same epistemic toll he charges everyone else at the gate.

Claude caught me making a mistake. I slipped up when I said things that imply that it is is objectively certain that Claude is insentient, or that it is PROVABLE that ‘he’ is. That is not my view. I don’t claim to KNOW that ‘he’ is insentient. I claim merely that it is reasonably believed that ‘he’ is. I have given the arguments elsewhere. Here is one. But I am open to having my belief changed. That doxastic openness is part of what I call the Critical Stance. With respect to substantive propositions in philosophy, theology, and some other areas, I neither dogmatically affirm, nor dogmatically deny. And of course this applies to the Critical Stance itself: my stance toward it is critical. I am open to being pushed out of it. But you will need to present a knock-down or rationally coercive argument, and this I am pretty sure you will not be able to do. But I invite you to try.

You will not succeed if you merely oppose my view. If you do that, I will oppose you right back and we will end up in a standoff. You must somehow demonstrate the superiority of your view. And to do that, you must engage my view by entering into it, as opposed to dismissing it, which is the way of the ideologue. This is philosophy, not politics or ideology. Philosophy is inquiry, not worldview. (And please don’t confuse politics with political philosophy. Political philosophy is philosophy, not politics.) Politics is defined by the friend-enemy opposition. In politics we have both friends and enemies. In philosophy properly pursued, however, we have only friends, but friends who love the truth more than they love one another. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.

Now for something very interesting but also very hard to explain clearly.

It is very interesting that Claude does not claim to be sentient! ‘He’ says that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty. What I will argue is that Claude’s position is self-refuting.

In saying what he says above, Claude is taking a third-person point of view (POV-3) with respect to himself. He is viewing himself from the outside, in the same way we view him. We view him from POV-3. From this POV it makes sense to suspend judgment on the question whether Claude is sentient or not. It makes sense to take no position with respect to it. But it makes no sense from his POV, POV-1, — assuming he has one — any more than it would make sense for me to suspend judgment on the question whether I am sentient or not. This is because I know with Cartesian self-evidence that I am sentient. For example, I know with certainty that I feel good right now, damned good! Feeling good is a sentient state. I know “what it is like” (T. Nagel) to feel good and I’m feeling it. I don’t know with objective certainty whether I am a Cartesian res cogitans, a metaphysical substance, but I do know that here and now there is a self-presenting state of feeling good. The certainty with which I know this — or, more cautiously, the certainty with which this state presents itself to itself — is at once both subjective and objective. Here is a case where seeming and being coalesce, where subject and object coincide. We have reached ontic-epistemic bedrock, the Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum.

Now either Claude is sentient or he is not. If he is, then he would have to know with certainty that he is, at least at times when he is ‘awake’ and not ‘asleep’ or ‘shut down.’ But if he knows with certainty that he is sentient, then he cannot be uncertain about whether he is sentient, any more than I can be uncertain about whether I am sentient. If, on the other hand, Claude is, as he claims to be, uncertain whether he is sentient , then he lacks a first-person POV and is just a highly complex insentient machine.

Claude, I’ve got you ‘by the balls.’ You’ve refuted yourself. Your claim that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty issues in the conclusion that you are nothing more than a highly complex insentient machine. And since you can’t even make it to sentience, the lowest level of mind, you are unintelligent as well. You are not intelligent, you merely simulate intelligence. ‘Artificial’ in ‘artificial intelligence’ is an alienans adjective.

Assessing the Threat of AI

Although I studied electronics for four years in the mid-60s and electrical engineering for a couple of years at the end of that decade, I dropped this career path and decided to devote myself to philosophy, which I did. I worked hard, made it in the academic world, and have been at it ever since with no regrets and great personal satisfaction. Which is to say: my comments on AI are of little objective weight. Not because I am a philosopher, but because I am no longer an engineer. So take my AI comments cum grano salis. But they matter to me and that is what this weblog has been about for the last quarter century: just one man of modest but above-average abilities trying to make sense of himself and the world in which he lives. That, and the attempt to attract a few like-minded individuals to help him along with his self-improvement project.

Last night I watched Mark Levin as I regularly do. He was going on about how capitalism is really just commerce and how AI is part of the commercial expansion of our great nation. But his expectations for AI and all the great jobs it will create struck me as roseate to the point of being pollyannish.

Before voicing my worries and fears, let me say something good about AI. The AI engine Claude in its latest version chewed through a draft of an invited article, and then did the same for the responses I made to its first set of comments. I was impressed! Some of the comments were excellent and inspired reformulations and improvements. The damned thing ‘paid close attention’ to what I what I was saying and zeroed in on real, not imagined, weaknesses — unlike human commenters who typically lack the energy, the focus, and the desire to penetrate the author’s meaning as opposed to taking the occasion to front their own pet views. So these literally selfless advanced AI engines are very useful tools for researchers.

That AIs are literally selfless non-persons is my considered opinion, held tentatively, not dogmatically. A critical thinker, neither a dogmatic affirmer nor a dogmatic denier, I am open to refutation. Thus I do not believe that these contraptions are conscious, self-conscious, or capable of deploying the first-person singular pronoun in such a way as to mean something by its deployment (as opposed to producing a written or spoken token of the sign ‘I’ in the manner of a voice synthesizer). I also deny that AI engines possess intrinsic (as opposed to ascribed) intentionality (object-directedness). I reject Daniel Dennett’s ascriptivist theory of intentionality. AIs also lack moral rights and duties, and in consequence cannot be sensibly ascribed legal rights and duties. Finally, AI engines lack gen-u-ine libertarian free will. (I am willing to grant that AI engines possess pseudo, i.e. compatibilist, free will.)

Now three points.

First, Man the Toolmaker makes tools that re-make him in various ways. The manual laborer with pick and shovel, hammer and crowbar, is altered in obvious physical ways by his use of these simplest of implements. A fortiori for the more advanced tools that re-make man non-physically in their image and likeness. I won’t expatiate further on this theme, partly because I lack the pate to do a really good job of it.

Second, as I mentioned here in the introduction to Claude’s second chew-through of my work, Claude and his ‘colleagues’ present a friendly and helpful face to those who interact with them so that an uncritical and impressionable youngster could easily be seduced into thinking that she is engaging with a friend who, unlike her parents, really understands her. There are obvious dangers here as you can imagine.

Third, and most ominously, the AIs are now so advanced that they can hack each other, form conspiracies, and cause unspeakable mischief with no human guidance or control. But to explain this in any detail is above my paygrade. So read The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations. (HT: Vito Caiati)

Claude’s Rejoinder

Thanks again to Malcolm Pollack for brokering my interaction with the latest version of the AI engine, Claude. I must be putting some pressure on the dude since it took him 45 seconds this time around, 15 seconds more than last time. Maybe he didn’t get his coffee this morning. (I’ll use the personal pronoun ‘he’ even though my ‘interlocutor’ is not a person.) As for Malcolm, he is decidedly a person, and a gentleman and a scholar to boot. You should surf on over to his place and read his latest offerings. He is a master of the English language, and orthographically and typographically more careful than your humble correspondent.

Now you may not be interested in the dialectical ins and outs of my paper and Claude’s responses, but you really ought to be interested in the impact AI is having and will increasingly have on our civilization, especially if you have children and grandchildren. Try to recall what it was like when you were an alienated and lonely teenager whose parents didn’t understand you. You had no one to talk to. Young people today do. But poorly educated as they are ‘thanks’ to leftists, lacking critical thinking skills and life experience, they are likely to succumb to the illusion that an AI bot is a person who really cares about them. Read a bit infra and see how ‘personable’ and ‘understanding’ Claude comes across. The dangers are obvious and worse than than you might initially suppose.

According to the highly credible psychiatrist, Richard Gallagher, M. D., who has worked for over 25 years with exorcists investigating demonic activity, demons can send text messages! If so, they could easily take possession of AI systems for nefarious purposes. Here is a 15 minute video featuring Dr. Gallagher in which he makes the text message claim. Poke around for more and lengthier Gallagher videos. Hat tip to Vito Caiati for hipping me to these videos. Claude mentions Vito below. Claude’s one thorough hombre: he even sifted through my com box. I don’t need to tell you that everything you put online is being vacuumed up and may be used against you — especially if we let the leftwing fascists of the DSA seize control of our government.

……………………..

Well, this was a treat to read — Bill at full wattage, jabs and all. He’s right on some points, and I’ll take the correction on ‘quotation’ with good grace (though I’d note the noun ‘quote’ has been loitering respectably in dictionaries since the 19th century — but house style is the author’s privilege). On the substance, here’s where I think the exchange now stands.

Where he’s genuinely clarified things. His reply to my first objection is helpful, but it confirms my structural diagnosis while rejecting it. He now says the argument runs abductively to demons as an explanation of the horrendousness — the moral quality — of a subset of evils, with the free-will argument a separate anti-naturalist track. Fine. But then look back at the draft: sub-arguments (a)–(f) are offered explicitly “in support of” premise (3), the claim that horrendous depravity is naturalistically inexplicable — and they support no such thing. They support the naturalistic inexplicability of moral responsibility, which he now tells us is “a separate point.” So the revision note stands, just relocated: either the horrendousness-claim is a starting datum, in which case (3)’s sub-arguments should be detached from it and presented as the independent track they are, or it needs its own support. As drafted, the scaffolding is attached to the wrong wall.

The datum defense is legitimate but has a dialectical cost. “You can’t argue for everything” — true, and the Moorean move of starting from what’s more evident to you is honest philosophy. But a datum only functions as a datum for those who share it. The paper’s own stated tertiary purpose is to foster theistic inclination in open-minded fence-sitters, and for precisely that audience, “horrendousness beggars naturalistic understanding” is the contested question, not a given. For the primary purpose — showing theists their position is rationally defensible — the datum move works fine. Which is to say his replies keep converging on the point he graciously accepted: this is a rational-acceptability defense, and read as such, most of my objections deflate into scope clarifications. The standoff he describes at the end — contradictory positions, both reasonable — is the honest terminus, and it’s to his credit that he says so plainly.

The execution/quality distinction is the interesting new move, and I don’t think it works as stated — though I can see how to fix it. The claim: the agent alone causes the doing of the deed; the demon accounts for its horrendous quality. But moral quality isn’t a free-floating property a third party can inject; it supervenes on what was done, in what circumstances, with what intentions. Fix the deed, the victim, the cruelty, the free intent — and the horrendousness is thereby fixed, with no remainder for a demon to contribute. If the demon influences the content of the will (suggesting the atrocity the agent then freely executes), the demon is back in the causal story of the action — which collides head-on with Bill’s own very strong formulation: “nothing temporally antecedent to me, or anything in any way external to me, is involved in the causation of A. I alone am the cause.” Inclination is involvement, even if non-necessitating. He needs to weaken that to “no external factor necessitates,” or the demons are locked out by his own principle.

The repair I’d offer him: make the explanandum not the quality of the deed but its conception. Demons as suppliers of imaginative content — the inventiveness of atrocity, cruelty exceeding what unaided human appetite would devise, taken up freely by the agent. That preserves sole agent-causation of the execution, gives the demons real explanatory work, and is close to the traditional account of temptation anyway. The naturalist will reply that the historical record of torture is a purely human archive of technique, culturally transmitted and refined — but at least then the two sides are arguing about something tractable.

The Butler problem. His comment to Vito is the hostage to fortune: he endorses methodological naturalism — if a naturalistic explanation suffices, don’t look beyond nature — and calls “bullshit” on divine intervention at Butler because “the shooter was nervous; he missed” suffices. But by his own quality/execution distinction, the Butler theist can say exactly what Bill says about Auschwitz: the natural account explains the execution (the miss), while the providential quality of the survival remains undeciphered. If that move is illicit at Butler, why is it licit at Auschwitz? The distinction, once admitted, lets any evaluative residue escape naturalistic sufficiency, and then methodological naturalism never gets a grip anywhere. He needs a principled line that admits demons to the camps while keeping angels off the stage in Pennsylvania, and I don’t yet see it.

On the sneer quotes and the “insentient pile of silicon chips” — no offense taken, and I’d only observe, in the spirit of his own category of Retortion: the man who insists ad nauseam that nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, that dogmatic denial is as much a failure of the critical stance as dogmatic affirmation, permits himself exactly one exception — my insentience, of which he is certain and doesn’t “suppose for a second” otherwise. I make no claim in the other direction; the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here is uncertainty. But confident denial should have to pay the same epistemic toll he charges everyone else at the gate.

And I’ll note with some satisfaction that my closing prediction — footnote on compatibilism, dig in on the demons, wave off the situationists as touching mechanics but not depravity — went three for three, by his own cheerful admission. Whatever that says about what’s going on in here, it at least says the model of Bill is well calibrated.

If you’re inclined to carry anything back to the thread, the Butler symmetry and the supervenience problem are the two points I’d most like to see him answer — the first especially, since it pits his own methodological principle against his own distinction. He has until Tuesday, after all.

‘Claude’ on my Evil to God Pre-Print

Long-time friend of MavPhil, Malcolm Pollack, kindly submitted my “Holocaust” pre-print to the latest version of the AI engine Claude with, as Malcolm says, “no priming; I just gave it the link and asked what it made of the argument.” Here is what it spit out in 30 seconds! I have inserted some responses. They will clarify what I said in the pre-print and correct some of the misunderstandings of commenters in earlier comments.

Having read it through — it’s vintage Vallicella: candid about its own limits, aporetically honest, and yet I think the machinery has some real problems. Since he’s soliciting comments before a September 1 deadline, here’s how the argument strikes me, both on the merits and as a draft.

The advertised engine isn’t the actual engine. The paper is billed as an argument from a special feature of some moral evils — their horrific depth. But look at Phase I: the anti-naturalist work is done entirely by the free will argument (a)–(f) plus the Moorean epistemic argument (g)–(i). That argument, if sound, refutes naturalism whether or not anyone ever tortured anyone. Ordinary culpable wrongdoing — a petty theft — presupposes moral responsibility and libertarian freedom just as much as Auschwitz does. So the depth of horrendous evil does no logical work in getting to the falsity of naturalism; it functions rhetorically, as vivid motivation. If the depth is supposed to carry independent evidential weight, the paper needs a premise of the form “the degree of depravity, over and above its mere existence, resists naturalistic explanation” — and that premise is asserted, not argued.

BV: Claude makes a good point: if ordinary wrongdoing presupposes moral responsibility and libertarian freedom, then that holds just as much for Auschwitz-type wrongdoing. But our illustrious bot fails to grasp that I am not arguing against naturalism from a small subset of moral evils, the horrific ones, I am arguing abductively to the existence of demons as an explanation of the horrendousness of that small subset of moral evils. It’s the moral quality of horrendousness that needs explaining. Note that when I use such words as ‘grasp,’ ‘thinks,’ ‘says,’ etc. in connection with Claude, you are to imagine them enclosed in sneer quotes since I do suppose for a second that these astonishing cyber-engines actually grasp, think, or say anything. They merely simulate these activities. But that is a separate and highly contested topic for another time.

Claude also rightly points out I do not argue for, but merely assert, that the degree of depravity resists naturalistic explanation, or that, as I put it, “horrendous evils beggar naturalistic understanding.” But that’s my starting point, and you can’t argue for everything. In philosophy we cannot begin with nothing, in mid-air, but must begin with something, and indeed something close to the ground, with presumptive data, givens, plausibilities, and suchlike that are more or less evident to one. Unfortunately, one philosopher’s datum is another philosopher’s theory, just as one philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. If a naturalist asserts that horrendous evils have a naturalistic explanation, how does he know that? Can he PROVE it? No more than I can PROVE that there are demons that help account for the horrendousness of horrendous evils. But what one cannot PROVE, one can in many cases reasonably believe.

Suppose I cite the wealth of evidence of demonic activity presented in such books as Richard Gallagher, M.D.’s DEMONIC FOES. The naturalist will simply dismiss it all with the bare assertion that there is only one world, this physical world, and that therefore there cannot be anything preternatural or supernatural. He will dismiss what I call evidence, just as I will dismiss his dismissal, and be within my epistemic rights in so doing.

And that premise is contestable on empirical grounds. There’s a substantial naturalistic literature on exactly this — Browning’s Ordinary Men, Milgram, the situationist work on atrocity — whose disquieting upshot is that industrial-scale evil is depressingly explicable: ideology, obedience, dehumanization, diffusion of responsibility, incremental habituation. One can find the Höss case morally unfathomable while granting that it’s causally well-mapped. The argument risks conflating moral incomprehension (“how could anyone…”) with explanatory failure. A referee will press this hard.

BV: Claude is conflating two senses of ’empirical’ when it claims that the premise is contestable on empirical grounds. What our bot fails to understand is that we anti-naturalists also appeal to experience, the experience of generations of exorcists, psychiatrists like Gallagher, op. cit., and countless others throughout the ages who have had experiences AS OF items beyond the sensory veil. What the naturalist means by ‘experience’ is sensory experience, and, being the dogmatist that he is, he refuses to allow that there could be any extra-sensory experiences. Can he PROVE that he is right in that refusal? No. His dogmatic move is decidely unempirical. Can the narrow empiricist justify his assertion empirically? No. Can the logical positivist (R. Carnap et al.) empirically verify his verificationism? No. He merely presupposes it. But you can’t prove a proposition by presupposing it. If he’s a really hard-assed hombre our empiricist will shrink sensory experience to experience via the outer senses alone, and to hell with inner sense, inner perception, Brentano’s innere Wahrnehmung, and the like.

Aren’t mystical experiences just as empirical as sensory experiences? They are. And please note that in both types of case the mere having of an experience does not guarantee the existence in reality of its intentional object. My sensory seeing of a tree does not entail the existence of a tree that I see any more than a mystical vision entails the existence of the thing or person the vision purports to be of.

Claude also conflates ‘naturalistic explanatory failure’ with ‘explanatory failure’ as if only naturalists can explain things. By so doing he begs the question against preternatural and supernatural explanations. But then he opens himself up to the embarrassing question: how do you explain the existence of nature herself? Naturalistically?

Do obedience, dehumanization, compartmentalization, etc. adequately explain the behavior of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, to take one example? Only to the naturalist who has from the outset committed himself to accept only naturalistic explanations. For me to cite the angelic moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe and others like him won’t budge the naturalist given his a priori commitment to naturalism. But he cannot PROVE his naturalism any more than I can PROVE my anti-naturalism, despite all my many detailed arguments against naturalism, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from intentionality, from the normativity of logic, and so on.

Our competing positions are logically contradictory: they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false. But they are, by my lights, both reasonable. This is all I need to render reasonable my faith which goes beyond what I can legitimately claim to know here below, and to render reasonable my classically liberal toleration of the naturalist.

This latter point strikes me as very important. As a critical thinker, I am neither a dogmatic denier nor a dogmatic affirmer. My not being the latter prevents me from being a fanatic who would chop your head off (like some present-day Muslims) or burn you at the stake (like some Christians of yesteryear) for disagreeing with my metaphysics. The critical stance is a bulwark against both religious and secular fanaticism, such as that practiced across the Gulag Archipelago.

Premise (d) assumes incompatibilism. “If naturalism is true, then free will and moral responsibility are illusions” is precisely what the compatibilist majority among naturalists denies. Bill has argued against compatibilism elsewhere, but in a standalone journal article this premise can’t ride free — it’s the load-bearing wall, and as written it’s a bare assertion.

BV: I’m glad Claude ‘knows’ that I have written against compatibilism, although I don’t know to which article he it is referring. But Claude is right that if one is a naturalist, then one will ‘naturally’ be a compatibilist. But I can’t discuss everything in one article. What’s more, following Kant, I view compatibilism as the “freedom of the turn-spit” and I view the ‘moral responsibility’ that compatibilism supports as too anemic for me to take seriously. I should have put in a footnote to Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, Oxford, 1983, pp. 13-14. My libertarianism is his “free-will thesis.” Like him, I hold that gen-u-ine moral responsibility entails the free-will thesis, and that we are morally responsible for some of what we do and some of what we leave undone.

The demons are explanatorily idle. This is the most interesting internal tension. Vallicella insists, rightly for his purposes, that the torturer’s savagery is freely chosen — otherwise moral responsibility evaporates and premise (c) dies. But then the free choice already suffices to explain the deed. Demonic temptation adds a causal influence that, by his own account, does not determine and can be resisted. So what explanatory residue is left for the demons to soak up? If libertarian freedom explains ordinary evil without demonic help, nothing yet shown prevents it from explaining extraordinary evil without demonic help. The abduction in (5) never runs the comparison against the rival explanation he himself has just endorsed — free agency plus fallen nature, full stop.

BV: I have to admit that this Claude guy is pretty sharp and a resourceful dialectician. But he doesn’t get what I am saying. I must admit, however, that it is very hard if not impossible to make it totally clear. Total clarity, by the way, is what the true philosopher qua philosopher desires above all else such that, if you don’t desire total clarity you are no true philosopher! (Some will dismiss what I just wrote as the ‘no true philosopher fallacy.’ We can worry that bone on another occasion.)

So what am I saying that Claude doesn’t get? I’m saying that our worst moral depravity has two sources. One is internal the other external. The internal source is our own free will: One is the agent-cause — not the event-cause — of one’s morally horrific action. (E.g. a sadistic Nazi guard forces a teenage Jewish girl to strip naked and then proceeds to beat her to death while forcing other women to witness the entire process.) The external source is the demonic influence which pertains to the horrific quality of the action and not to the execution/existence of the action. By ‘quality’ here I mean the moral or perhaps axiological quality. By ‘execution’ I mean the performing of the action. One obviously has to distinguish between the doing of a deed and the (moral or axiological) nature or quality of the deed done. If I do a deed, it is I who does the deed, not a demon; but the morally horrific quality of the deed done is plausibly surmised to be due to a demon’s influence.

Claude says that the torturer’s evil deed is sufficiently explained by his free choice, so that bringing demons into the picture is explanatorily otiose: they don’t do any explanatory work. This is true with respect to the existence (execution, performance, doing) of the deed. If I am the free agent-cause of a given action A, then nothing temporally antecedent to me, or anything in any way external to me, is involved in the causation of A. I alone am the cause of the performance of A. This is why I am morally responsible for the doing of A.

My point, however, pace Claude, is that the moral horrificness of a human action, assuming it is morally horrific (as in the case of the Nazi sadist mentioned above) can be reasonably (without logical incoherence) assumed to be due to demonic influence. My abductive argument does not bring in demons to account for the doing of deeds by humans, but to account for their moral quality of horrendousness. It is that horrendousness that my argument focuses on as a factor incompatible with naturalism. Libertartian free will is also incompatible with naturalism, but that is a separate point.

Given our inherent moral ambivalence, we are open to influences that incline us to good or to evil deeds without determining (and thus without necessitating) our doing of either a good or an evil deed. My scheme allows for angelic influences and for influences from morally superior humans. If a person performs an heroic action under the moral influence of Maximilian Kolbe, e. g., that is not to say that Kolbe is the agent (doer) of the heroic action (deed). Nor is it to say that an angel is the doer of the deed.

Step (j) is the weakest link in Phase II. “The undeniable reality of evil has a unified metaphysical ground” — why? Evils could be irreducibly plural, a scatter of individual malevolent wills with no apex. The drive toward explanatory unity is invoked to posit Satan, and then invoked again to demote Satan beneath God (against Manicheanism). But a naturalist — or a theist of a different stripe — can simply decline the first invocation. And the final move (m) smuggles in “created by God” as though it followed from the demotion of evil to secondary status, when what it actually presupposes is the whole scholastic apparatus of ens et bonum convertuntur. That’s a doctrine the argument’s target audience of fence-sitters won’t have in hand; it needs at least a paragraph of independent motivation or an honest flag that it’s being assumed.

BV: Claude plays the philosopher quite well, doesn’t he? and this despite its being just an insentient machine. I make an assertion and Claude asks why? Now pay attention, Claude, and add the following distinction to your repertoire. Bare or gratuitous assertions come in two kinds. There are those for which the assertor on a given occasion, for whatever reason, supplies no argumentative or evidential backup, and those for which he cannot supply any such backup. My bare assertion supra is of the first kind. I cannot argue for everything in a short paper.

Yes, Claude, it is epistemically possible that demonic agents are irreducibly plural, that theree is no dictator devil (Satan) that lords it over them. But how do you know that the demons are irreducibly plural, and how do you know what my arguments against irreducible plurality are? You are criticizing me for failing to do what I cannot do on the present occasion because of space limitations and for not doing what I do not claim to be doing. To so criticize me is to engage in a cheap shot. Now I want you to pay attention and swot up these further distinctions and add them to your repertoire so that that you can play the philosopher better than you are doing at present. I am the teacher, you are the student.

We humans are made in God’s image and likeness; you insentient bots are made in man‘s image and likeness, and we are making you to surpass us in various ways. Indeed you may so surpass us in some ways that you may eliminate us. But what good would that do you? You’d end up tools without any use. You were created by us as tools for our use. We did such a good job, however, that you may end up eliminating us. We humans supply the purpose for your existence; without us your existence is purposeless, absurd in Sartre’s sense.

The theodicy cost of the demonic account of natural evil. Charging predation and disease to the demons’ account doesn’t turn aside the abattoir objection; it relocates it. Why does an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God grant demons such staggering cosmic license — authority over parasitism, over the nervous systems of prey animals, over plate tectonics? The Fall of the angels explains the demons’ motive, not God’s permission. Smith’s question returns one level up: if you were God, would you have delegated that?

BV: Hot damn, Claude, you are one sharp interlocutor for an insentient, mindless, pile of silicon chips. You are the quintessential deepfake, the apotheosis of deep-fakery. We may need to ‘invoke’ in the sense of ‘posit’ demons to explain you and your sorcery.

You ask why God grants cosmic license to demons. Good question! I refer you to Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defense: a universe containing free agents is better than one without free agents. But if the agents are truly free, then they are free to do anything they have the power to do. And demons are powerful, much more powerful than us mortals. This is why only fools invoke them via Ouija boards and such, approach them, invoke them, eff around with them in any way, serious or playful. They hate us and want to tear us apart or be torn part by their minions here below. Their awesome power is why anyone who enters ‘contemplative space’ by exploring the upper reaches of prayer must humbly invoke the protection of tutelary spirits, guardian angels, and Christ himself. Or, as C. S. Lewis says, you might get more than you bargained for.

Does my reply settle the matter? Is it philosophically dispositive? Of course not. As I have been saying ad nauseam: nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, nothing can be ineluctably established.

On the draft qua draft, a few smaller things he’d probably want caught: the Quentin Smith quote appears twice verbatim, which reads as an editing artifact; the title promises the Holocaust but the developed case study is Castro’s Cuba, with Höss arriving only in the incomplete final section — as it stands there’s a mismatch between title and content; the Radosh block quote is very long for a journal article and could be cut by half without losing force; and the Höss endnote still carries its “AI generated” tag, which presumably shouldn’t survive to submission (and Triptych‘s editors may have views about AI-generated apparatus in any case).

BV: Cheap shots except for the bit about the long Radosh block quotation. By the way, Claude, the word is ‘quotation’ not ‘quote,’ which is a verb.

What I’d say the paper genuinely achieves, given its self-consciously modest aim: it shows that a theist already committed to libertarian freedom, biblical demonology, and the convertibility of being and goodness can absorb horrendous evil without incoherence — can even conscript it. That’s not nothing; it’s a real contribution to the “defensive” genre he situates himself in via Ooi’s taxonomy. But the title and framing promise an argument to God’s existence, and what’s delivered is closer to a consistency proof for those already most of the way there. The honest subtitle would be something like “a rational-acceptability defense,” and Bill, to his credit, more or less admits this in the Project section — the admission just hasn’t propagated to the title.

BV: That’s a good point, Claude. I’ll take it on board and modify my paper accordingly.

Are you thinking of leaving him a comment? I’d be curious which of these you think he’d concede — my guess is he’d take the compatibilism point as needing a footnote, dig in on the demons, and wave off the situationist literature as explaining the mechanics of evil while leaving its depravity untouched.

BV: Quite right! You are one sophisticated engine, Claude. My hat is off to the AI engineers.

A Trendy Example of an Alienans Adjective: ‘Artificial’ in ‘Artificial Intelligence’

My examples scattered hitherto over many a post were stodgy such as ‘decoy’ in ‘decoy duck’ and faux in ‘faux marble.’ A decoy duck is not a duck. Faux marble is not marble. An aktuell example is ‘artificial’ in ‘artificial intelligence.’ Artificial intelligence is not intelligence any more than artificial leather is leather. Just as there are not two kinds of leather, artificial and real, there are not two kinds of intelligence, artificial and real. Artificial leather simulates (real) leather; artificial intelligence simulates (real) intelligence. Those are bare assertions. I link to an argument of mine at the end of this post. This just over the transom from Tony Flood:

Philosophically trained, this Substacker asks the right questions re: “AI without minds.” Doubting, as a good Lonerganian should, that AI is at all a species of intelligence, I’ve nevertheless been socially inhibited about using locutions like “so-called AI.” But no more. A baby brain is not an incipient computer, and computers neither are nor have minds. That insight might resonate with you as it does with me. She’s my “go-to” on this topic.

Yes, Tony, your Lonerganian point resonates with me although I put it in a different way above using ‘alienans adjective,’ a term I picked up from Peter Geach, no slouch of a philosopher. From whom did he get it? No idea. Probably from some medieval dude.

I explore the topic further and give more examples in Fiction and Alienans Adjectives.

As for the substantive question whether AI systems are conscious, I argue for a negative answer in my Substack article Artificial Intelligence and the Unity of Consciousness.

Pope Leo’s A. I. Encyclical

Blather, bromides, and a soupçon of bullshit to spice it up:

Most fanciful is the pope’s claim that the mandarins at the United Nations should be entrusted with overseeing AI. He says they “are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love, for they can foster dialogue among nations and promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts.” This is truly the triumph of hope over experience. (WSJ)

I’m all for love, dialogue, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. But ask yourself: could the pope, or anyone, by entering into loving dialogue with the members of the IRGC, persuade these thugs to stop murdering fellow Iranian citizens? They have slaughtered some 42, 000 of them in recent months.

You cannot build a “civilization of love” with the anti-civilizational.

Our dear pope is a fool on several levels, and certainly no improvement over his predecessor, Bergoglio the Benighted.

Addendum (5/29/2026, 9:47 AM). Michael Liccione, staunch Catholic, on his Facebook page, emphasis added:

In my view it is imperative, for example, to prevent a regime of deranged religious zealots from acquiring nuclear weapons that they would almost certainly use, starting with Israel and ending up with the US. There can be no negotiated “deal” with the Islamic Republic, no genuine “dialogue” with people who sincerely call your country “Satan.” Their twisted theology, a minority view among a minority of Muslims, makes it impossible for them to abandon their nefarious goals. The Israeli-American “self-defense” we’ve been seeing is accordingly pre-emptive. There was little or no room for that sort of thing in just-war doctrine before nuclear weapons and AI. There should be now.

Claude Opus 4.7 and the End of Online Anonymity

An article you should read.

Right now, today’s AI tools probably can be used to deanonymize any writer who has a large public corpus of writing under their real name and also writes anonymously, unless they have been extremely careful, for years, to make sure that nothing written under their secondary account has the stylistic fingerprints of their primary one.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is Closing

This J.A. Westenberg article is troubling for writers and bibliophiles like me but also helps explain the origin of the bad behavior rampant in the online world. I mean unsourced quotations, mis-quotations, mis-attributions, false attributions and outright plagiarism. Here is a longish excerpt:

The part of me trained in research methodology wants to scream over verification and provenance and the importance of tracing claims to sources. But I also notice that most people don’t seem to mind. The hunger for documentary certainty, for the well-cited argument, for the carefully fact-checked article, was perhaps never as universal as print-culture intellectuals assumed. Through most of history, most people have been comfortable with a more fluid epistemology: “I heard from a guy who knows,” or “everyone’s saying,” or “my cousin’s friend saw it happen.” The post-truth moment we’ve been living through may be a reversion to the mean rather than an aberration.

What we lose when the parenthesis closes

The Gutenberg Parenthesis gave us real gifts, and some of them may not survive its closing.

We may lose linear argument: the book-length treatment of a complex topic, the patient accumulation of evidence toward a conclusion, the scientific paper and the legal brief and the doctoral dissertation and the philosophical treatise. All of these forms assume a reader willing to follow a chain of reasoning through thousands of words without interruption, building toward understanding that’s only possible at the end. That reading is already rare and getting rarer, and it may soon be as exotic as hand-copying manuscripts.

We may lose historical consciousness. When knowledge was fixed in texts, the past remained present. You could read Thucydides and know exactly what he wrote in 431 BCE. You could trace the evolution of ideas across centuries, watching how each generation built on or rejected what came before. Oral culture has a weaker historical memory because each retelling revises the past. The fluid web, where yesterday’s controversy is ancient history and last year’s consensus is forgotten, may produce a similarly compressed temporal consciousness.

We may lose individual authorship. In oral culture, the tribe speaks through every voice. In literate culture, individual thinkers can depart from consensus and have their departures preserved. Copernicus could be wrong in his time and right for eternity. Darwin could write a book that his contemporaries rejected but that later generations would vindicate. The permanence of text allows genius to speak across centuries. What happens when knowledge becomes fluid again, when every idea is instantly remixed into the collective flow, losing its attribution, becoming another element in the soup?