“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)
I got a call at the wildlife refuge where we volunteer on Fridays from an excited woman who spotted a furry creature when she was walking the trails the evening before. She wanted to know if anyone had reported a lost pet ferret. “No,” I replied. “Tell me what you saw.” I love some of the calls we get and questions from visitors at the desk.
She described a small, long, slender mammal with a luminous coat. I told her it was more than likely a mink, of which Sachuest Refuge has a few. “Wow!, “she said, “I didn’t know we had those around here.” [i]
I told her the story of a friend of ours who had an artificial fishpond her late husband had built for her that she was very fond of sitting near and watching the various finned and gilled creatures swimming about. One morning, she made her way to her fishpond chair to discover carnage. Half eaten and uneaten dead fish were strewn willy nilly on the rock riprap banks as if a plague wiped them out. Every last one of them. Nothing but lily pads left in the pond. A mink living in her stone wall had its way with them. A similar nocturnal mink catastrophe befell the outside fishpond at the local Agway store, but some carp survived. I said to the lady on the phone that not everyone has a positive experience with minks, and since they are smaller than most folks expect, it takes a whole lot of them to make a coat, but I was happy she enjoyed seeing one. They are beautiful. When I volunteer at the visitor center, I sometimes get in trouble entertaining myself with an interjection of reality. She was a very nice woman full of enthusiasm and bubbling over with happiness.
Although minks are not endangered, I do object to turning them into coats to signal our prosperity, and I like to see them too. See them being minks. Slinking through the meadow grass, catching fish, raiding waterfowl nests for eggs, snatching meals snagging crabs, small voles or mice, making little minks and dodging coyotes, Northern harriers, and red tail hawks.
Our ranger here is young, smart, hard-working, pleasant, and passionate about what she does. She manages the trails, fields, woods, shoreline, wildlife, visitors, the visitor center, projects at other national wildlife refuges, the bureaucracy of her home office, and unruly volunteers like Rita and me. Good thing that she has a lot of energy. This weekend she was training a new batch of volunteer piping plover watchers and monitors. Piping plovers are wonders to watch feed and fly in murmuration. They are endangered and some of them nest along the rocks at the refuge end of Sachuest Beach. The rest of the beach is a walking haven for us for eight months of the year, and a popular swimming, surfing, and sunbathing haven for thousands in the summer. Keeping the tourists and local swimmers away from the piping plover nests is just one of our busy ranger’s many responsibilities. [ii]
“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” Aldo Leopold, Round River (published posthumously, 1953)
Only human beings discover the wonder in nature and want to protect other species, deriving no real Darwinian benefit to us. Just beautiful and true in some hard to define sense, so we find it good. Only human beings would dedicate their lives to doing good for a small shoreline bird that is darting back and forth between the waves with their tiny legs a blur to pick out small crustaceans and bugs. Or attend a class to learn how to help. A mink would only notice a piping plover if it wanted to hunt for its nest. A mink would not watch in wonder as a plover danced between the waves. A mink would not ponder the morality of eating an endangered species’ rare eggs. Not for a nanosecond would it hesitate to suck out breakfast.
Transcendentals: beauty, truth, goodness, are cherished by human beings. Some would argue we are a randomly mutated collection of cells which somehow by extraordinary chance evolved into consciousness, then an inner life, then a conscience with an unlikely set of common values. Some would argue that pondering transcendentals and seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful indicates we are creatures with a purpose Not a lucky accident but created in the Creator’s Image with the desire deep in our heart for unity with the transcendental. I would be in the second camp. Protecting piping plovers would be one small piece of evidence.
But that perspective is being challenged at a fundamental level. “What is a human being?” and “What is virtue?” and “What is human meaning and purpose?” are once again being debated in all their implications with the emergence of new technology and the machines we create developing so rapidly that it seems to have assumed a life of its own. And every premise is being deconstructed in its aftermath.
I’ve ‘chatted’ with a variety of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence: Claude, Alexa, Grok, Gemini, Co-Pilot and mostly ChatGPT To be sure, in the last three years the progress in these machines is extraordinary, in conversational fluency, calculating skills, problem solving, precise responsiveness with nuance to inquiries with fewer errors and hallucinations. However, they remain remarkably capable, even uncanny simulacra.[iii]
Humans have long excelled in fabricating uncanny simulacra with a gift to evoke other human responses, emotions, and new ideas. Michelangelo ‘s David silences the observer with its detail, beauty, power, and presence. But it will never slay Goliath or seduce poor Uriah’s wife. A detailed online map with links could help us better appreciate Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge, but it will never be the complex reality of marsh, rocks, waves, flowering fields and shrubs, over two hundred species of birds and mammals, wind, weather, and awe. AI can tell us most everything about a mink: habitat, food, where and how it builds a den, how it lives and reproduces, how it lives with detailed descriptions and images. But it will never experience the excitement of a hiker who sees one for the first time. Andi will never be a mink.
“And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.” Paul Simon, Sounds of Silence
Last week, a new voice joined the debate in a profound way. Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical a year after Chicago born Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected to sit in the chair of Peter as the 267th Pope, leading over a billion Catholics. He has made the news a few times, most recently when a president made the inane comments that a world religious leader had no business speaking out on the morality of war. But I digress.
He wrote forty three thousand words on the nature of Artificial Intelligence and its implications for the rest of us. How it intensifies the debate about the nature of a human person. Ghost in machine? Accidental consciousness fired up in random atoms? Exceptional combination of the material and spiritual created by God Imago Dei with an obligation to care for the rest of creation? Meat Legos or a person with an eternal destiny and unique calling? He wrote how we are distinguished from our machines with an uncrossable border. Our crisis is not merely ideological; it is intensely anthropological and will have an impact on the rest of my life and yours in unpredictable ways. We ought to be paying close attention.
Magnifica Humanitas will stir introspection and debate in the Church and society to a degree perhaps not seen since his predecessor Leo XIII wrote his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum. Leo XIII released his a hundred and thirty five years to the day before this one. He wrote about the human costs and implications of the Industrial Revolution. Leo today reiterated and expanded the Catholic social principles from Leo XIII that instantiate the teachings of Christ in new ways to address our postmodern culture. As usual, way too much for a blog post, so I’ll let one sample inspire your own reflections.
“What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”
“Maybe someday I’ll wake up
And I’ll do what I should
Write a song to make heaven and earth
Go waltzing in time.” John Prine, Beautiful World
Let us all go to work. None of us will escape. There is much to be done. No one will be exempt from the effects and implications of this dialogue with our future. I heard a story this week from a talk by Monsignor James Shea, one of our favorite writers about our times and culture. He said Pope Paul VI (now St. Paul VI) was asked by a journalist what was the most momentous day of his life. His questioner fully expected to hear about the day Paul was elected Pope. Or his ordination as a priest. Or his baptism followed by some remarks about salvation. None of the above. It seems saints see things differently.
“Today,” Paul replied. “Today is most momentous day of my life. It’s all I have.”
“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” St. Mother Teresa
[i] Photo open source from Wikipedia, Mink for Wiki
[ii] Photo: I Naturalist – c Grigory Heaton some rights reserved, cc by NC
[iii] Simulacra is the plural of simulacrum, which I find best describes what AI does and is. A simulacrum is a representation of a something else. An effigy. An image. A reproduction made from something other than the original it represents.
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