Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts

Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts

Is Claude Conscious or just a Tool? | Ep 15

Oct 16, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min · 11 segments

In this episode of \*Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts\*, hosts Casey Hart ( @OntologyExplained ) and Carl Brown…

In this episode of \*Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts\*, hosts Casey Hart ( @OntologyExplained ) and Carl Brown ( @InternetOfBugs ) dive into the strange intersection of theology, tech hype, and AI ethics. Anthropic recently updated its terms of service to forbid "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models—effectively banning users from "torturing" Claude. But are large language models actually capable of feeling pain, or are we just projecting humanity into statistical matrix math?Casey and Carl explore Anthropic's lobbying efforts aimed at the Catholic Church and other religious leaders, the Pope’s encyclical addressing machine intelligence and human art, and the philosophical absurdity of two recent papers claiming to map "functional pain" and "well-being" onto LLM vector spaces. Along the way, they unpack a viral GitHub "torture chamber" experiment, why adding a "constipation vector" breaks an LLM just as easily as pain, and why current AI models remain miles away from genuine sentience. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-lobbying-vatican https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/09/29/pope-leo-says-ai-safety-fears-are-not-fake-news-and-criticizes-nvidias-billionaire-ceo/https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/dangerous-myth-conscious-ai/ https://aiweekly.co/alerts/anthropic-lobbied-pope-leo-xivs-advisers-over-ai-consciousness* Dr. Charles Camosy: https://www.youtube.com/live/vhWeyGEplU4* 404 Media: Report https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLYyF\_nxNh0Papal Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence (May 2026), Section 99: "Magnifica Humanitas" https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html* Pope's Statement on X / Twitter (October 8): https://x.com/Pontifex/status/2105983638147891490 Ren et al. – "AI Well-Being: Measuring and Improving the Functional Pleasure and Pain of AIs" https://www.ai-wellbeing.org/paper.pdf* Tagliabue et al. – "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It" https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247v1* "The Neurogenic Case Against Synthetic Sentience" https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05397Projects & Tools:* GitHub: The AI "Torture Chamber" steering repository and README rebuttal experiments https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber* Anthropic Terms of Service update: Prohibition on "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update* Nightshade: Data poisoning tool for image generative modelshttps://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13828 https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html* Moltbook: LLM agent social media experiment archives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYfgjYVEYQ000:00:00 - Introduction & Anthropic’s Cruelty Ban00:01:55 - Lobbying Religious Leaders on AI Sentience00:05:20 - Possibility of Machine Consciousness vs. Today's Reality00:07:30 - PR Stunts, Regulatory Capture, and Rabbi Navon’s Dilemma00:15:10 - Why Target the Catholic Church?00:20:40 - The Pope’s Encyclical and the Human Element00:26:00 - Historical Panics and Cold War Parallels00:31:00 - The Ontological Difference in AI Art00:36:15 - Pattern Averaging vs. Transformative Human Art00:44:40 - Paper 1: AI Well-Being and Utility Functions00:50:30 - Moltbook and Human Anthropomorphic Projection00:57:50 - Paper 2: The "Pain Axis" and Vector Direction01:02:40 - The GitHub Torture Chamber & The Constipation Vector01:09:40 - Why Anthropic Actually Cares (Training Data vs. Press)01:14:30 - Aligning Intentions, Sentience Tests, and Outro#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Philosophy #Anthropic #Claude #MachineLearning #AIEthics #TechPodcast #LLM #Consciousness.

In this episode of \*Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts\*, hosts Casey Hart ( @OntologyExplained ) and Carl Brown…

Are Current AIs Conscious?2:08 – 7:26

2:08

But something like since last fall, like about the last year, apparently, Anthropic in particular has been flying out religious scholars and moral theorists and things like that to take them out to fine dinners, stuff like that, and say, hey, have you guys thought about how awesome and conscious and interesting the ethical questions are about our models about artificial intelligence

2:36

thoughts i i the hubris just kind of blows my mind so okay so you know that i'm i'm cynical on these kinds of subjects right so you know for me i'm more likely to read it as we're trying to build credibility for how powerful and revolutionary and world changing these things are going to be to get us better valuations and all of that kind of stuff.

3:03

But there's a, there's a version of this, a world where some of these idiots actually believe that these things are conscious and are making the case in what they believe is good faith.

3:19

I mean, and we've seen this before, right? I mean, there was a, there was a Google researcher, what, a couple of years ago, who decided that one of the, one of their, you know, really, really primitive by today's standards, AIs was conscious and like went public with it and got fired and it was a whole thing.

3:42

And so, you know, we know there's this, I'll call it AI psychosis for lack of a better word, where these people get very, you know, convinced by these chatbots.

3:55

Of all kinds of things.

3:57

And if that's the case, that's even scarier to me.

4:02

Yeah, I think there's a spectrum here, and we should also be careful to...

4:07

There are hopefully some people out there listening to this podcast who are like, I don't know what to think about artificial intelligence, right? And if you find yourself like, is this the kind of thing that could be conscious? I think that is a reasonable enough question to come to where you're like, I don't know that much about this.

4:21

What's going on here? And there's the spectrum of folks from true believers who think this stuff is conscious.

4:29

They're like, full in AI psychosis, whatever you want to want to say about it.

4:32

Right.

4:33

They've bought it.

4:34

There are other folks somewhere in, well, I guess the other poll is people are like, nah, it's, it's a machine, right? Like it's just, you know, doing the kinds of stuff that we ask it to do.

4:43

And no, no different than I thought my floppy disk wasn't conscious, you know, years and years ago.

4:49

It's nothing's, nothing's changed here.

4:51

And then there are some folks in the middle who are like, look, we don't understand that well how human brains work.

4:57

We know there's a whole bunch of neurons connecting things in a large language model.

5:01

They have a bunch of different weights and parameters that are interacting in complex ways that we don't fully understand.

5:08

Maybe that's the sort of complex supervenience base upon which some sort of consciousness or minds could emerge.

5:19

And there's all sorts of folks in between.

5:21

I guess there's kind of two questions here.

5:23

Although there's really one that we're primarily going to focus on today.

5:27

But one of the questions is basically, is it possible for an AI to be conscious at some point? Full stop, right? And that's a much more interesting question.

UnknownUnknown

5:38

And I would be very

Are Current AIs Conscious?2:08 – 7:26

2:08

But something like since last fall, like about the last year, apparently, Anthropic in particular has been flying out religious scholars and moral theorists and things like that to take them out to fine dinners, stuff like that, and say, hey, have you guys thought about how awesome and conscious and interesting the ethical questions are about our models about artificial intelligence

2:36

thoughts i i the hubris just kind of blows my mind so okay so you know that i'm i'm cynical on these kinds of subjects right so you know for me i'm more likely to read it as we're trying to build credibility for how powerful and revolutionary and world changing these things are going to be to get us better valuations and all of that kind of stuff.

3:03

But there's a, there's a version of this, a world where some of these idiots actually believe that these things are conscious and are making the case in what they believe is good faith.

3:19

I mean, and we've seen this before, right? I mean, there was a, there was a Google researcher, what, a couple of years ago, who decided that one of the, one of their, you know, really, really primitive by today's standards, AIs was conscious and like went public with it and got fired and it was a whole thing.

3:42

And so, you know, we know there's this, I'll call it AI psychosis for lack of a better word, where these people get very, you know, convinced by these chatbots.

3:55

Of all kinds of things.

3:57

And if that's the case, that's even scarier to me.

4:02

Yeah, I think there's a spectrum here, and we should also be careful to...

4:07

There are hopefully some people out there listening to this podcast who are like, I don't know what to think about artificial intelligence, right? And if you find yourself like, is this the kind of thing that could be conscious? I think that is a reasonable enough question to come to where you're like, I don't know that much about this.

4:21

What's going on here? And there's the spectrum of folks from true believers who think this stuff is conscious.

4:29

They're like, full in AI psychosis, whatever you want to want to say about it.

4:32

Right.

4:33

They've bought it.

4:34

There are other folks somewhere in, well, I guess the other poll is people are like, nah, it's, it's a machine, right? Like it's just, you know, doing the kinds of stuff that we ask it to do.

4:43

And no, no different than I thought my floppy disk wasn't conscious, you know, years and years ago.

4:49

It's nothing's, nothing's changed here.

4:51

And then there are some folks in the middle who are like, look, we don't understand that well how human brains work.

4:57

We know there's a whole bunch of neurons connecting things in a large language model.

5:01

They have a bunch of different weights and parameters that are interacting in complex ways that we don't fully understand.

5:08

Maybe that's the sort of complex supervenience base upon which some sort of consciousness or minds could emerge.

5:19

And there's all sorts of folks in between.

5:21

I guess there's kind of two questions here.

5:23

Although there's really one that we're primarily going to focus on today.

5:27

But one of the questions is basically, is it possible for an AI to be conscious at some point? Full stop, right? And that's a much more interesting question.

UnknownUnknown

5:38

And I would be very