Everyone who knows anything about Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” “knows” that it is about sex. Anyone who knows more than a little about the theology of the body understands that to say it is about sex is a bit like saying the book of Genesis is a treatise on the morality of fruit consumption.
The theology of the body is an extended exercise in incarnational anthropology. It is about human embodiedness. Because of this, it has a great deal to teach us beyond the realm of human sexuality.
To the point, the theology of the body offers a striking and underappreciated relevance for our thinking about Artificial Intelligence.
Much of our fascination with (and anxiety about) AI has understandably focused on the ability of AI to simulate the human mind. And so much of the discussion about AI focuses on our ability to reliably distinguish AI “thinking” from human thought.
In his encyclical Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV distinguishes some of the tantalizing capacities of artificial intelligence from the authentically human capacities that AI is designed to mimic:
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. (MH, 99)
Pope Leo mentions the human body right at the outset, but he focuses on distinguishing AI’s capacity to simulate human language and learning from our human capacity for the same.
These are all important distinctions, to be sure. But the evident, objective differences between AI and the human mind are not the only – and perhaps not even the most important – distinction between humanity and AI.
The old Scholastic categories of form and matter are suddenly relevant again. To be human is to be body-and-soul, not simply a soul in a body. Our souls are the form and principle of our bodies. The one cannot exist independent of the other, except by supernatural means. This is why we are mortal and why we are made for resurrection.
To be human means to be, in a way, incomplete in ourselves. We were made for communion, a reality of which our very bodies, male and female, are a sign. To be human is to be a social and political animal, both of which require bodies. To be human is to be, as it were, a matrimonial animal. None of this could be accomplished simply by uploading a mind into a machine (even a biological machine) even if such a thing were possible.
It’s worth noting that we humans also learn language through imitation. We learn “behavior and analytic skills,” “empathy and understanding” in much the same way. If we are to identify what separates us from AI, we will have to dig deeper than the assertion that AI’s abilities are a mere “simulation” of human qualities, however accurately imitated.
Our consciences are formed (or disfigured) by learning through imitation. Through conscience, we can distinguish good from evil, but we do not always do so. We can feign moral judgment and conviction.
In fact, we humans are so good at feigning certain judgments and behaviors that we can deceive others, and even ourselves, about our true motives and feelings. While we may be good judges of our own authentic intentions (provided our conscience is well formed), we are often quite bad at judging the same in others.
Each of us is intimately aware of our own personal experiences of both consciousness and conscience. But these experiences in others, while somehow communicable, remain in some way utterly inaccessible to us. We can never be “in the mind” of another person the way we are “in” our own mind.
Which is to say, my ability to distinguish between a human person and “artificial intelligence” ought not to rest upon the assumption that I can tell the difference between the subjective experience of another human and the “subjective experience” of AI.
Because the fact is that I cannot know either directly.
The most enduring and outwardly recognizable (I do not say the most important) difference between human beings and AI is thus not the capacity for language or “thought” or the appearance of emotion – which we may not be able to distinguish between “real” and “simulated” – but precisely our bodies, which, again, are much more than biological machines.
Our bodies, particularly understood in the light of the theology of the body, reveal both what we are and what we are for. More than that, our bodies reveal a great deal about creation as a whole and the God who created us and who became incarnate Himself.
Which brings us back to John Paul II and the theology of the body:
The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it. So the very sacramentality of creation, the sacramentality of the world was revealed in a way, in man created in the image of God. (Emphasis added.)
This is the very heart of the theology of the body, in which John Paul II gave us a powerful account of what human embodiedness tells us about ourselves, the world, and God. It is a message people of today desperately need to hear – perhaps none more than those in Silicon Valley, who seem in danger of losing sight of humanity even as they try to recreate it.
