What the algorithm cannot achieve

The Encyclical Dilexit nos, “He Loved Us…”, by Pope Francis, is surprising from its very wording: on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus. It is one thing to know, theologically, that Jesus Christ is true God and true Man; and another, in an existential and endearing dimension, to realize that this same Christ, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, has a heart like the one I have. A heart of flesh, with its dreams, its memories, its joys and sorrows. A human heart that beats and feels.

As the first footnote of Dilexit nos states, many of the considerations in the first chapter are based on the writings and reflections of Father Diego Fares, S.J., born in Mendoza in 1955, received into the Society of Jesus in 1976 by the then Jesuit Provincial in Argentina, Father Jorge Bergoglio, who was also his godfather at his ordination to the priesthood in 1986. Father Fares died in Rome in 2022 and the Pope attended his funeral at the Jesuit General Curia.

It seems to me that Chapter I of Dilexit nos: The Importance of the Heart, is called to be a watershed in the history of the philosophy of knowledge and in Catholic morality. And that the Pope is aware of this and wants to make it clear and explicit.

Artificial intelligence, Dilexit nos and heart

Thus, for example, in n. 14, he warns us that all that the idea of “algorithm”, such as Artificial Intelligence, entails, makes us realize that our thoughts and decisions of the will are not so original, nor so specific or proper, but on the contrary, they are quite “standard”, much more than we thought, while it is not so in the case of the heart.

No. 20 of the Dilexit nos, on the heart of Jesus, is one of the most tender and endearing texts that can be found in the pontifical texts, from the beginning of the centuries until now, and precisely for this reason, it seems to me that it is worthwhile to leave it here in its entirety:

In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home.

It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy.

All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.

It is not difficult to glimpse Pope Francis with his mother or grandmother turning over the dumpling, or looking at the little worms in the shoebox or, even more tenderly, removing the petals of a daisy one by one. That is speaking to the faithful from the heart through a Pontifical Encyclical! Continue reading with the article: Pope Francis’ latest encyclical.

Raafel Ruiz

See also: Celibacy: a Heart passionate for God