[ExI] Pope Leo and AI

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2026 at 7:34 PM William Arnett <waarnett at mac.com> wrote:

*> Don’t conflate intelligence with personhood unless you really intend to
> and then with some justification. IMHO, the relation between them is very
> much an open question. *


*I don't think it is an open question and I have plenty of justification
for saying that.**I know through direct experience that random mutation and
natural selection managed to produce at least one person, me, and probably
many billions. And direct experience outranks everything, even the
scientific method. But **natural selection has no way of detecting
personhood, however natural selection CAN detect intelligent behavior.
Therefore the logical conclusion is that personhood (regardless of
what definition you care to give to that word) must be the inevitable
byproduct of intelligent data processing.  *

*> Anthropomorphizing a toaster is silly. *


*Although I can't prove doing so would be incorrect, I agree with you that
it would be silly because a toaster does not behave intelligently. That's
why I've never been a big fan of zombie movies and TV shows, cadavers do
not behave intelligently so it's silly to anthropomorphize them.*

*> Anthropomorphizing Claude is...*


*...not silly because Claude's behavior is very intelligent.  *

*> You need at least an operational definition of “person”*


*Do you have such a definition of "person"? If you don't and if it is
really needed as you claim, then how can you say that another human being
is a "person"? The answer of course is that unless you're dealing in formal
logic or mathematics definitions are not very important because
all definitions are fundamentally circular; they are all made of words that
are in a dictionary that have their own definitions that are also in the
dictionary, and round and round we go. So where did lexicographers get the
knowledge to write their dictionary? They got it from examples. So a
"person" is something that behaves like that guy and that guy and that guy.*


> *> You make a very reasonable ASSUMPTION that my mind is like yours.*
>

*Right now our minds are similar because right now neither of us are
sleeping or under anesthesia or dead, but that will not always be the
case.  *

*> if I anthropomorphize Claude I’m asserting a likeness that’s very
> different again. The question is whether that includes “personhood” *


*As I keep saying, it's unimportant if a human anthropomorphizes an AI and
considers it a person, of far more practical importance is if the AI
anthropomorphizes humans and considers them to be persons. *

*John K Clark*
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