2026-05-25

Chris Olah speaks at the Vatican! What a time to be alive!

Pope apologizes for Vatican's role in legitimizing slavery

• "a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians"
• In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.
• The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
• A Jesuit priest has written on slavery in the church in All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church

NYU prof Jeff Sebo thinks AI is conscious. Cites this paper: 2411.00986

• "Computational functionalism is the hypothesis that some class of computations suffices for consciousness"
• "It is by no means obvious that any of these theories are correct, especially in their stronger versions. Our claim is not that they are correct, but only that there is a realistic possibility that one of them is correct."
• they see consciousness as an emergent property, even from pure matter: "it may be that increased cognitive capacity tends to bring about consciousness, in both biological and digital systems."
• David Chalmers: "I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have a credence over 50 percent that we’ll have sophisticated LLM+ systems (that is, LLM+ systems with behavior that seems comparable to that of animals that we take to be conscious) with all of these properties73 within a decade. It also wouldn’t be unreasonable to have at least a 50 percent credence that if we develop sophisticated systems with all of these properties, they will be conscious. Those figures would leave us with a credence of 25 percent or more [emphasis ours]"
• some believe the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare (preferentism) extends to non-conscious beings
  • Why might these kinds of agency suffice for moral patienthood? First, intentional agents are potentially welfare subjects. 80 It seems plausible that when you have desires, your life goes better for you when your desires are satisfied and worse for you when your desires are frustrated. Moreover, the satisfaction or frustration of desires can benefit or harm you whether or not you consciously experience them.81 On some views, this is why we can be posthumously harmed, for example.82 And while some people think that desire-satisfaction and desire-frustration matter only for conscious beings, others think that they matter for non-conscious beings as well, and so animals with desires deserve moral consideration whether or not they can consciously experience pain, for instance.83
• Reflective agency, particularly in its propositional form, then adds the ability to have desires about our own desires, which is at the root of some conceptions of free will, the self, and personal identity.84 Specifically, our desires become “ours” in a new sense when we endorse them through reflection.