Matthew Yglesias argues the Pope's AI statements endorse superstitious mind-body dualism while identifying valid ethical risks

The Pope pretty clearly holds the same position that Aristotle and Augustine and Thomas and MacIntyre and Taylor all hold: that thinking is an action specifically of embodied intellect, that is, of the human organism as a whole. That is, if anything, the opposite of dualism.

@mattyglesias this is like criticizing the pope for being catholic.

@mattyglesias id sit this one out man. really youre out of your depth

@mattyglesias The Catholic Church officially condemned mind/body dualism (both substance dualism and property dualism) at the Council of Vienne in 1312.

@mattyglesias “Superstitious” and he’s talking about the pope lmaooo

@mattyglesias You really are a midwit lol

@mattyglesias Thank you for the unsolicited advice based on 20 minutes of reading an encyclical that took month to write and edit in the original Latin.

@Pontifex is no doubt humbled by your undeniable genius.

@joeblow87423561 @mattyglesias In lieu of a drawn out thread, here’s a basic explainer video that gets everything right (although it’s simplified for accessibility). https://youtu.be/NTSQPDOn0xc?si=y-S-BDIG9GEOsC5Z

@mattyglesias He’s the pope of the Catholic Church — not the head of a secular NGO.

@mattyglesias He's not doing that. He correctly argued that computer programs are not conscious.

@mattyglesias (Nb hylomorphism is incompatible with both forms of dualism)

@dwaldenwrites Aristotelian functionalism is my own favorite theory. Real heads know Michael Thompson is today’s Wittgenstein and thought is an activity of the soul.

But it doesn’t get a lot of play in phil mind or psych/neuro. Which people are not dumb or “ignorant of the literature”

@mattyglesias If anyone is to be forgiven for stubborn attachment to mind/body dualism it is the Pope.

@mattyglesias It’s funny - I made the exact opposite point. His metaphysics are directionally right but his politics and ethics are directionally decel (and wrong).

@mattyglesias You know the Pope is Catholic right? (Also he is still correct here lol.)

@agostino_harry @mattyglesias Haven’t read very far into the encyclical yet but my 1st instinct is that this is just equivocation - to eg the Thomist the soul as substantial form of the body is non-dualist but to some analytic philosophers positing any fundamentally immaterial activity is dualism.

@dwaldenwrites The fundamental teleology present in the Aristotelian distinction between matter and form is dualistic in character.

@etoeth @mattyglesias I cannot rule out the existence of a deity but one can almost certainly rule out the existence of a soul. When you get hit in the skull with a brick, your neural damage is not your soul being partially ablated. Sentience is a physical phenomenon.

@mattyglesias You mean that the Pope, like all Catholics, believes in the existance & the immortality of the human soul. We are not a body that has a soul. We are a soul that has a body.

@johnhboyer @mattyglesias Out of curiosity, how is that supposed to work when you're supposed to have a physical body that dies and a soul that lives forever?