Douthat, A.I., and Pope Leo

Ross Douthat, The Atheist and the Machine God, NYTimes, May 9, 2026.

Douthout is anticipating Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on A.I. For Douthat the crucial issue is consciousness:

In one possible timeline, the advent of A.I. is widely understood as a win for atheism and a blow against religious ideas of soul and spirit, persuading more people that their own minds are just computers — no divine spark or immortal soul, just the meatspace equivalent of a helpful chatbot or an A.I. therapist.

In another potential future, the mystery of consciousness ends up seeming more profound in the shadow of machine intelligence, the mystical finds new appeal as a form of experience computers cannot emulate, and religion becomes a place for human exceptionalists to plant a defiant flag.

But between those two scenarios there’s a future where artificial intelligence mostly increases metaphysical uncertainty, leaving a lot of people simply unsettled about fundamental questions, increasingly “mysterian” rather than clearly atheistic or devout.

That’s how my encounters with Silicon Valley culture often feel: Beneath a materialist carapace, it’s a place where people who aren’t sure exactly what they’re building dabble in Buddhist metaphysics or consult with Catholic priests, adopt churchy or cultish attitudes toward their new creations or rebel into apocalyptic doomsaying.

Douthat then goes on to discuss Richard Dawkins’ recent encounter with Claude in which Dawkins, the Great Atheist, fools himself into thinking that Claude is conscious. Douthat asks:

Meanwhile, in its less-besotted passages, Dawkins’s essay circles around an important question for materialists like himself. The origin and nature of consciousness currently evades our understanding, but the good Darwinian is committed to the proposition that it evolved to serve some crucial evolutionary purpose. But if a digital entity seems to display the capacities that we associate with conscious minds, and we don’t believe that this entity is actually conscious, then what is consciousness’s true purpose? If we can have intelligence without self-awareness, a zombie that calculates and speaks, why does the self exist at all?

I'm not so sure that consciousness is the issue. It's complicated. My own view of consciousness is derived from the work of William Powers, which seems thoroughly materialist to me. But I'm not at all sure what that means, not in a world with quantum mechanics and deep complexity. Deep complexity itself presents issues, interesting ones. At the moment I'm considering the possibility that deep complexity gives us Aristotle's unmoved mover or Paul Tillich's God as the ground of being.

Douthat ends up with this as his penultimate paragraph:

As certain philosophers have argued, this harmony between the psychological and the physical seems more much likely to appear in a universe where consciousness is fundamental, where matter isn’t everything and Mind is where things start.

I'm not familiar with those certain philosophers, but who knows? I'm thinking that deep complexity gives us a generative universe, and that's all we need. But I'm still working on it.

What I'm looking for from Pop Leo's encyclical is how it discusses A.I. and idolatry. Now, just how is THAt entangled with consciousness?