A few days ago, a new issue of Think:Act Magazine landed in my inbox. I saw that it featured an interview with the now-deceased Pope Francis’ advisor on AI, Paolo Benanti, and it immediately caught my interest. Benanti, I thought, might offer a perspective on AI that differs from the mainstream – and he does. But I think it’s worth asking whether his response is shaped by his affiliation with the Catholic Church and its Thomistic philosophical underpinnings.

Asked whether he thinks AI can become, or has already become, sentient or conscious, he answers:

I come from an engineering background and I know very well that a Turing machine can only solve certain problems. And proof of consciousness is not such a problem. We have systems that may fool us into believing they are conscious, but not more. This makes it a hypothetical problem for now, while it is much more urgent and important to discuss the effects that these AI systems can have on human labor, equality and access to resources such as energy or water.

Well, it appears that we can’t solve the problem of consciousness either – or muster a proof of it in humans, for that matter. Does that mean we are not conscious?

Indeed, what exactly is it we want proof of? We don’t have a good theory of consciousness – in fact, not even one that commands any real consensus. As John Haugeland notes in his widely cited introduction to cognitive science:

[I]t is true that cognitive science sheds virtually no light on the issue of what consciousness is … indeed, the term itself is almost a dirty word in the technical literature. Unfortunately, nobody has anything very specific or explanatory to say about consciousness – it is just mysterious, regardless of your point of view. But that means that a cognitivist can say, “Look, none of us has much of an idea of what consciousness is; so how can we be so sure either that genuine understanding is impossible without it, or that semantic engines won’t ever have it (e.g., when they are big and sophisticated enough)?”

Until we have a good theory of what consciousness is, it’s very difficult to say whether something – or someone, for that matter – has it or not. And that should make us far less cocksure that something doesn’t have it, or cannot have it.

So if the facts don’t warrant Benanti’s confidence, what might? One plausible answer is that it arises from the metaphysical commitments his faith prescribes: particularly, the Thomistic dualism of mind and matter. If one begins from the assumption that consciousness is the province of an immaterial soul, then machines are excluded by definition. But in that case, the confidence is not the result of philosophical argument or scientific reasoning – it is an expression of theological commitment.