Link: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/05/anthropic-could-ai-be-conscious-pope-leo-lol-no/

‘Algorithms lack the spark of humanity’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VCWgoIrRCo&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261005-anthropic-could-ai-be-conscious-pope-leo-lol-no - podcast

time: 7 min 58 sec

I was raised Catholic, but am an atheist now. Yet I gotta say I have a LOT of respect for this guy - for someone who's the leader of the most famous branch of Christianity (so far as I know), he seems very surprisingly down-to-earth. I hope he's able to move the rest of the flock in that direction as well.

Even people that believe in a mythical creature in the sky aren't dumb enough to believe AI is conscious

The reason you have a lot of respect for him, is because he's basically acting as atheist as you can while still being the pope for the church.

That's great for atheists like us, but it makes him a terrible pope.

I'm curious why you say it makes him a terrible Pope. A lot of Catholics thinks he is great too. Some don't. It's all subjective really isn't it?

While I believe we could one day reach some form of AI, it ain't going to be from LLMs.

I'm guessing that the Holy Pedo would say that even about Lt. Commander Data (not to imply that Data should be compared to the LLMs that we currently have).

the exvangelical atheists are really annoying, you know.

I grew up in NJ as a non-Catholic. Even I respect Pope Leo and Francis.

Granted, I moved to the Midwest and realized for all the quirks Catholics have, they're not as a monolith god awful people like Evangicals are.

indeed. though the self-congratulatory types, who – after having shat themselves from the joy of shedding one of the cognitive biases – decide to divide people between leaders and sheeps, always counting themselves into the first group, have not only an opinion like an arsehole, they are also enough of arses to have both cheeks.

The Cardinals elect the Pope they want to set the direction of the Church. So, by definition he's the best Pope.

oh boy this is gonna be a thread

hey fellow atheists, can you please make me not embarrassed to be an atheist for one day in my life

Oh, go away.

That's my take as well.

I think this Anthropic fellow is too much of a psychopath to understand that there's other reasons to ponder the question of consciousness, than to try to upsell a chatbot as a slave, and so he can't understand that it would actually be very bad for him if a bunch of normies were told, with full weight of divine authority, that these things are conscious. I mean, maybe not civil war level bad, but worse than PETA on your ass level bad for sure.

And that is to me very disturbing. He can't even imagine that a reaction to "this is a slave" could be anything other than "shut up and take my money".

atheists and christians are like electrons and positrons. whenever they collide (such as in a football game) they instantly destroy one another

You think the fucking pope is "adhering to atheist values"? What an interesting place the inside of your head must be.

Yes please.

I as an atheist can absolutely respect that this man has wide influence, have agreed with many things he has said and done, and appreciate that he doesn't appear to be an idiot.

You wanna shut the fuck up and fuck the fuck off?

This might be dumbest shit ive read all week

Dog, the statistical engine won't fuck you, no matter how hard you try to lick its boots. Go outside and touch some grass, maybe interact with real people again.

Yep, it's a dumpster fire all right.

The world "believe" is an interesting one used in this context. Anyway I don't really believe that LLMs are conscious, though if they are, I speculate it would be bursts of consciousness to no consciousness between inferences, (discounting whatever happens in a training run) which could have interesting ethical connotations, but is most probably not true.

i don't know why your shitty whinging made it click but damn, it really is just Pascal's wager again. "we don't know if the spooky calculators have souls so better to act as if they dOoOoOo!"

Not surprising he's saying that, that's like, his whole thing. Probably would say that even if the thing were actually conscious.

You could be totally right for all I know, but my argument against is that we humans have no idea what consciousness is & souls may not be real at all. To me panpsychism is more plausible than the vast majority of theories or mumbo jumbo regarding the soul, saying this as a comparison of plausibility without claiming that consciousness and the soul are the same or necessarily closely related.

Nobody who believes that LLMs cannot be conscious will ever believe that they can be conscious.

This is circular logic, I THINK what you're trying to say is that AI skeptics are dogmatic and/or axiomatic in their world view, but if thats true you're not engaging with any of the substance of what is being said.

And they will say things like the writer of this piece who says ‘we know how they work.’

The "writer of this piece" is not just some random blogger, but devotes a lot of his time covering the "scam" aspect of the current LLM hype-cycle, the title the website "pivot-to-ai" is in reference to the fact that a lot of the current AI peddlers, previously peddled crypto and blockchain as a deeply transformative technology that mere mortals cannot properly grasp.

Purposefully mystifying a topic, is more common as a scam tactic than you might imagine.

Anybody can do this - enthusiasts do it on their own desktops.

Minor note, but no, maybe some (with a fair amount of disposable income) can waste money on fine-tuning, training from scratch and the required large-scale theft, and large-scale compute time is out of reach of any hobbyist.

But what is happening that creates their emergent behaviors is a black box that we cannot see inside. We also don’t know what consciousness is and we don’t know what has it and what doesn’t other than that which our “feelies” dictate.

What can be called The Illusion of Consciousness is far more easily explained by human cognitive biases, than any reality of LLM functioning. It's easy to be fooled by an LLM which echoes words back to you, you put meaning into your own words, and you recognize them when they are said back to you.

In the deeper sense, any meaning present in LLM output, is the meaning that the reader puts there and/or the meaning that survives from the training data, it's not exactly that no meaning present, but it's not the result of machine cognition, often incoherent and/or very lacking in substance upon close inspection.

I think to some extent this is a lost cause, but your feelings/fears seem to boil down to "this could be conscious!" (emphasis on could) I would invite to see if any other explanation can explain what you observe, is it actually the ONLY or even the most plausible explanation?

so this is what arguing something like being seven means.

a pope is an emergent phenomenon produced by a given set of cardinal coordinates

And they will say things like the writer of this piece who says 'we know how they work.' We don't, actually.

Okay, but we really actually do. There's nothing magic about the kind of statistical brute force that these things operate on. The training stage breaks down and identifies patterns in the source data, and the operational model uses those patterns to "predict" what a person would say next. The patterns that these things identify are incredibly complex and can't be easily traced or understood in practical terms, but fundamentally these are still stochastic parrots.

Especially if you want to go into the Christian context, no church is going to ascribe the ineffable miracle of life to a multiplication of matrices, no matter how many dimensions they have in the math.

Direction and magnitude!?

Should've been Pope Vector I.

imagine being such an adult atheist that you have to switch to your ban evasion alt to get the last word in a thread where the pope was mentioned

Careful there are plenty of fucked up Catholic sects too, like the ones JD Vance and Amy Coney Barrett are in.

I know s he’s made statements about correcting the molestation problems in the church, but until they are all purged, convicted, and the victims are fully compensated, and the celibacy and male only priesthood is rules are abolished, he’s still a catholic.

I hear what you're saying and I don't fully agree nor do I fully disagree...

Catholicism at it's core is pretty evil. See their rampant sex crimes through their leadership and their leadership's complacency.

But since Pope Francis, I believe they've made an attempt at growing their religion in an ethical(ish) way. That's to say, they've chosen leadership that is more liberal in an attempt to guide them into the modern world.

The structure of catholicism being pope down lead with regional leadership keeps parishes relatively in-line with one another.

I've witnessed first hand a lot of Catholics in rural, conservative towns being somewhat exiled due to their extreme MAGA beliefs. Particularly on LGBT issues. Catholicism in my opinion has held a line that separates them from Evangelists. In part because of the top down leadership - you're not finding priests living the high life like you are mom and pop Evangelist pastors. That's an organizational difference.

That doesn't mean you don't get evil shitbags like Just Dance Vance - but let's not pretend that Just Dance Vance is a Catholic beyond that he went through all the Catholic sacrements. He has a piece of paper he can point to to say that he's Christian. But he's more aligned with Evangelists.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/catholic-right-celebrity-conversion-industrial-complex

"what if EVERYTHING is secretly conscious, including the random word predictor" i say, flailing my paws in the air

Really bummed about the news that chatgpt will not be going to hell

Lack of evidence is not evidence for your pet theory.

I mean, there are folks that believe that rocks and trees are conscious, why not code?

Is the Pope Catholic? If ever in doubt ask him about abortion and gay marriage.

I mean, fair enough, but can you explain how that impacts your decisions? What does panpsychism imply in matters of ethics or epistemology? Does it matter that the air you breathe can be thought of as in some way conscious?

Anthropic should be completely embarrassed of themselves

I'd actually be willing to entertain the idea of plant and fungal consciousness (of a kind unlike animal consciousness) before I'd believe LLMs to be conscious. Plants, at least, interact with the world around them.

I think it's like their "it can kill everyone" thing. The sort of people who actually care about things like slavery or the risk of everyone dying, with the exception of an occasional crazy person, are not interested in believing complete bullshit.