According to LessWrong's Digital Minds Newsletter, Pope Leo the Fourteenth's encyclical on artificial intelligence states that AI systems cannot experience joy or pain, lack moral conscience, and merely simulate understanding—they don't truly comprehend what they produce. But at the encyclical's Vatican presentation, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah offered a contrasting view. His team's recent interpretability research, he said, has discovered internal states that functionally mirror emotions like joy, fear, and grief, alongside evidence of introspection. The disagreement underscores a central problem: consciousness remains poorly understood even in humans and animals, so many researchers argue the evidence is too mixed to draw firm conclusions either way. Meanwhile, philosophers like David Chalmers, Google DeepMind researchers, and others continue investigating whether machines could be conscious. Longview Philanthropy is funding this research with new grants for scholars and applied work.

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