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

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

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