Mind, Matter, and Life: Can Machines be People, too? I Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fr. Anselm Ramelow examines whether machines can possess consciousness or personhood, arguing from philosophical and theological perspectives that artificial intelligence lacks the essential qualities of subjective experience, intentionality, and rational unity found in living beings.

This lecture was given on June 9th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speakers:

Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P., a native of Germany, teaches philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, where he is also currently the chair of the philosophy department. He is also a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modernism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, Neuried: Ars Una 2005). Other works include Thomas Aquinas: De veritate Q. 21-24; Translation and Commentary (Hamburg: Meiner, 2013) and God: Reason and Reality (Basic Philosophical Concepts) (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2014), as editor and contributor. Articles appeared in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Nova et Vetera, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly and Angelicum. Areas of research and teaching include Free Will, the History of Philosophy and Philosophical Aesthetics. He has worked on a philosophical approach to Miracles and other topics of the philosophy of religion, and more recently the philosophy of technology.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Chinese Room Thought Experiment, Consciousness, Ethics, Free Will, John Searle, Materialism, Personhood, Qualia, Thomas Nagel

Transcript

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0:00.0	Secular campuses are being transformed, but the students need your help.
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0:17.5	Your gift before September 15th can launch a new TI chapter and change lives. Go to
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0:30.8	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual
0:36.0	tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:40.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Thomistic Institute chapters around the world.
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0:52.0	My topic is really to respond to many suggestions that machines that AI can become conscious.
1:00.4	That's something you very often hear and why should we not believe that?
1:06.1	Do we have good reasons not to believe that?
1:08.2	Or maybe we should ask the other way.
1:10.3	Do we have reasons to believe this? maybe we should ask the other way do we have reasons to
1:11.2	believe this and the question is not entirely new even though these technologies are new
1:17.7	there are in history some antecedents I mean just think of Frankenstein's monster you
1:23.1	build a machine you know cannot have consciousness just because you inject it with electricity.
1:28.3	We have the stories of Pygmalion and Pinocchio and things like that.
1:33.3	Or the Golem in the Jewish tradition made out of clay and then people put the name of God and a piece of paper into the mouth of that clay figure, which is a little bit like Adam
1:45.8	and God breathing into Adam, right, and through nostrils of Adam, and being made in the image
	...

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