A Philosopher Questions Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas

Should we “remain profoundly human” or embrace tech-driven evolution, even the singularity?

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Pope Leo XIV provides a framework for understanding the impact of AI in his letter to the Catholic church, “*Magnifica Humanitas*.”

I summarize the 42,000-word letter and offer a few thoughts here.

[embed]The Pope’s Surprising Warning About Artificial Intelligence Human Dignity, Economic Justice, and the Questions Silicon Valley Rarely Asksmedium.com

Ilia Delio, a neuroscientist turned nun and philosopher, wrote the most interesting reaction to Magnifica Humanitas that I’ve seen. She flatly rejects Pope Leo’s metaphysics and, therefore, most of his argument.

Pope Leo vs. Ilia Delio

Pope Leo describes humanity as “magnificent” in and of itself, a view grounded in the conviction of each person’s inherent dignity as God’s creation and image.

Delio counters that creation itself is magnificent, and humans are merely conscious of this magnificence. For her, Pope Leo’s metaphysics stops short of identifying ultimate reality.

As a result, Leo seems to regard the current state of humans as the ideal. Delio counters that humans have always evolved through natural processes and can and should continue evolving through technology (we don’t have selection pressures anymore thanks to our many technologies).

We’re already post-human in Delio’s view. We should keep going.

Because he views current humanity as ideal, Leo also includes human limitations and weaknesses as part of our inherent magnificence and dignity. He says that our limits are not problems to be corrected through technology but rather fundamental to what it means to be human.

Love, for instance, seems to be impossible without experiencing suffering, for to love is to care for something that can be lost. Technologies that could eliminate suffering, such as the fusion of mind and machine, should be rejected as incompatible with humanity.

However, Delio argues that transcending human limitations with technology is also inherently human. As a species, we now evolve through and alongside our technology. That technology now includes “other minds,” i.e., AI.

For her, Pope Leo’s call to “remain profoundly human” misses the mark. Instead, the challenge is how to become human in the AI age, to cultivate our inner spirituality when AI offers instant, authoritative answers. Eventually, the challenge will morph into becoming human when our minds operate within computers.

The Risk of Seeking God Outside Ourselves

We’ve been taught, Delio adds, that God resides outside of us. We seek God “out there” rather than within us. This seems to be the metaphysics of Pope Leo in Magnifica Humanitas, for he urges the centering of God, as though God is separate from our souls.

If we believe in Pope Leo’s metaphysics, Delio warns that, ironically, we can come to regard AI as God — not in the sense of creator, but in the sense of a guide, a source of meaning. If the source of our spiritual lives is outside ourselves, then that is where we will seek spiritual meaning. People who struggle to find God can much more easily find AI, “an oracle” that is “omnipresent, seemingly omniscient.”

The challenge, if Delio is right, becomes developing our humanity by reclaiming our inner connection with God rather than seeking God outside ourselves and, as secularization progresses, supplanting God with more tangible AI chatbots.

Eventually, if Delio is right, the challenge will be developing our connection to God when we achieve immortality through the fusion of our minds with computers.

So, when Leo says we should “remain profoundly human,” Delio hears a mistake. She thinks the question is, how do we “become human” in the age of AI? Or when the fusion of mind and computer—the singularity — happens?

How do we continue to love, for example, if everyone’s conscious experience occurs in the “cloud” of some computer server, effectively granting immortality to that consciousness?

My Response to Delio

I partly agree with Ilia Delio’s critique of Leo’s metaphysics.

There is something distinctly human about transcending limitations through technology. From the wheel to bifocal lenses to life-saving medicine, humans evolve through and along with their technology. The call to “remain profoundly human” rejects what humans have always done.

Yet it is unsettling to extrapolate current progress to a not-too-distant future in which humans embed technology into their bodies: smart glasses wirelessly connected to brain implants; brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that enable people to control robots; the singularity.

At what point does a cyborg stop being human?

Or, channeling Delio, at what point does a human lack the ability to become a person within the cocoon of technology?

Remember the sci-fi classic, The Matrix? People experienced every sensory perception, relationship, joy, and pain through a computer program. Most of them didn’t know the difference between the simulation and reality. Heck, we could all be plugged into a matrix right now without realizing it.

Yet if that were true, I still feel the subjective experience that we refer to as “being human.” I still feel connected to something bigger than myself — the entity, the experience, that we call “God.”

So perhaps, we can remain human no matter how integrated we become with computers, so long as we can continue becoming human through cultivating our inner spirituality.

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