Field Interview With A Catholic Priest

Key Points:

• Grief is a critical part of authentic human experience, and learning to live with facsimiles of sorrow arrests being able to have the opportunity to go deeper into God

• The rich relational aspect of human experience cannot be reduced to a set of responses. Friendship is more than an exchange of information. It is the soul and the body working together.

• Humans are deeply communal beings. We crave interaction with others.

• We have lost the ability to sit in silence. Silence is painful in a lot of ways. Once you get used to it, it’s intoxicating, it’s beautiful. We have grown accustomed to numbing our pain and not embracing it as part of what it means to be alive.

• Pain isn’t good in itself. But it's a necessary part of human experience. Because ultimately pain comes from love. If we try to fill our time with something that's really just a coping mechanism, we lose the opportunity to realize that pain comes from love.
  

Transcript:

Matt: I'm super grateful for your time. I think this is a really, really interesting subject. And when I think about this kind of technology that harvests a human essence and digitizes it through artificial intelligence for recall, after death, I think about a lot of questions of faith. I think a lot about the difference between what it feels like to be alive and what we know to happen after death. So one of the questions that I wanted to ask you was, what what's happening with artificial intelligence and these products, I think has a really strong relationship with my practice of faith, my understanding of faith. So we celebrate the resurrection we commune with those not physically present. And we speak of eternal life. And in these cases, captured in the zeros and ones with code for as long as the server still runs. There, but they're not there. And I don't believe that this technology is nearly the same thing as our relationship but it can often feel like it's trying to be this technology is developed to help cope with grief of loss. Thinking also challenges, existing beliefs about the space. So my question really, to begin here is do you think this kind of technology poses risks for those seeking closure and comfort? What do you think about this kind of thing?

A: I think there are definitely there are definitely warning signs and things that immediately go off as to the idea that this could be a concerning use of technology. Because I think to use the analogy of a picture frame like comparing a picture frame. Which I think actually that can go to show why it’s concerning somebody. It's one thing to look at a picture frame and just remember that it's another thing to be like, obsessing over the picture, right? And talking to the picture and stroking the picture. It's a little weird.

Matt: Or the picture talking back.

The Importance Of Grief And Learning To Move On

A: Right. So I think there is a certain level in which things can help us to really help to remind us of the person that we love. But there's a point at which you're gonna get diminishing returns, the more you use that, so obsessing over the picture probably doesn't help. And then this technology actually takes that a step further, right. To the point where you have to ask me, will this help because ultimately, grief is not. Grief is about learning to move on.

I think in a way with this technology, my initial reaction is that this looks a lot like trying to lie to yourself, that the person is not right, you know, right. But they are, you know, and so trying to pretend that they're still here. That seems kind of dishonest. And, you know, I've seen personally how people cannot, if they don't admit, and they're meant to feel their loss and feel the pain then they don't go through the grief in all things in life.

If we try to live without the cross, there's there's something that's frustrated within our heart, because because ultimately like we all have, we all have baggage. You know, we all have you had something that that kind of hurts, right? Whether it's happened to us or something we've done exactly that we can all go back. But so we all have problems. And how are we going to deal with that? Are we going to numb ourselves to it and not feel it, and just move on pretending it's not there. Take up your cross and rise, take up your cross daily and follow Me.

And so following Christ comes from taking up the cross. And so I think as Christians we see these trials not as futile, right? I think at one point in that video that you sent me, she said death is stupid. Death is futile. Right? That's not what we think. Right there. There's a certain sadness that always will come with death. It's never you know, it's never an easy thing. But Christ, when He died on the cross, he seemed to fight death. And so that dying, whether it's dying to ourself every day, through our lives, or at the end of our life, Christ brings good from that death, right? And so there's this kind of that idea of trying to pretend we can get around death. That's ultimately just kind of its kind of neurotic action.

Matt: And that's one of the big criticisms of this technology in that it actually prolongs grief. Prevents it. And the recall of someone's voice through like an Alexa app. Or you know, doesn't provide closure. And some of the different startups do it in different ways. So the example in the video, they very specifically position their product, as a product of of remembrance, which is where the family phone and they're like they see as some kind of modern extension of what you have in the other companies are really interested in. Emulation, input that is difference between sort of remembrance and emulation one is about trying to recreate or trying to really capture the essence of someone and then bring them back in an interactive form, which seems even more egregious from what you're talking about.

Human Experience Cannot Be Reduced To A Set Of Responses

A: Yeah, like it's one thing to kind of talk to a bot but another thing to talk to kind of try to pretend that a person is reducible to a set of responses. Right? That ultimately the problem is there's a very materialistic idea to that extreme idea that we're just a set of responses. We're just a collection of information. Right? And even to go further that we desire to commune with people. I think you use the analogy of social media. I'm actually pretty anti social media overall. I just over the years thought a lot and ultimately decided it isn’t actually very social and is very deceptive. And people were starting to see it. A lot of people are getting off it. And what I found with social media, and this connects to this topic as well, is it creates the illusion of of relationship with people without actually giving it to you. It creates a false sense of friendship, because friendship is more than just an exchange of information. That's what that's what social media does an exchange of information. Right? And often in a very impersonal way, right?

Facebook is the only one I ever really had. And on Facebook, you make a post, and then people reply the post. It's very public. It's not necessarily social, right? And so not only is there exclusively just the information exchange, it's not exchanging any kind of personal way. So take that and then look at what is a real friendship.

What Is Friendship?

Your friendship is a sharing of lives, right? If friendship was just an exchange of information. I don't know anything about music, but I'd be friends with Beyonce. I just do it by researching her. But there's something deeper there. And so I think then, that same notion rings true with the idea of these technologies that are trying to preserve relationship. But you're not. You're not doing that because a relationship is more than just an exchange of information. It's a sharing of life. There's an experience that's physical in nature of our body and soul. That is what we Catholics believe.

And we're not just ghosts hanging out in bodies, right? And we're not just bodies, right? So in both of these, you'll see both those ideas, one that we're just bodies, and that there's really no such thing as a soul. And then the other idea is that we're just souls and the body is a robot body. Or even worse a prison. Some of the ancient philosophers up to Aristotle thought of that. Plato would have thought of the body as more of a prison. Maybe there's something more to what we experience, and that's what we live as Catholics. That the body is not extra, it's not a bonus, and it's not a prison. It's a beautiful and glorious creation of God. And it's part of us but it's not like that. There's two separate elements, there's a body and then a soul. They are one. There's no distinction as far as two separate entities that come together. That's not how it works.

And so, you know, we can't ever separate that notion that there is a physical element to a relationship. That's not to say we can never have long distance relationships. But there's something missing there. I have friends that I have long distance. I only have this friendship because I know them first in a physical, real, in person, context, and you're really holding those relationships over for those times that you can be together.

Matt: And they require effort. They require work to maintain relationship. I just want to lean in a bit on your thoughts around social media. Because I agree. In many ways, social is the least thing they are. I agree with that. A lot of this technology really runs on the oil of the human story. That's really what they're trying to digitize. And they're using human stories as a kind of proxy for a lot of things that are deeply human. And the premise of the approach is that by digitizing them and being able to recall them, that we somehow get at the spirit of the person. The argument is that it goes beyond the zeros and ones of the information, even though of course, literally it's code on a server somewhere. But the digitizing of a person's recall of where they grew up, or how they met your mom. The things deeply personal to them. The hypothesis is that you get closer to the idea of it being real. Now, I'm very skeptical about that, but the examples they show, and the users of the products attest to this.

A: You're right. They're focused on the story. But to what end?

Matt: I don't have a crisp answer for this, but I think you could take a Facebook centric, cynical approach, that the more you use the product, and the more you engage with the kind of gaming of your use of the products, the better it is for the product. It's that wisdom that when it comes to things like social media, if the product is free, then you are the product. You could take that kind of cynical commercial path with that answer. They're interested in the monthly recurring payment. But I think it depends on how cynical you think they are and how true they are to the mission of wanting to help with grief. I think with many of these kinds of technologies, the intent is there. But there's enormous risk of unintended consequence.

Digital Expressions Of Grief Counseling

A: I didn't get the sense that maybe these people that she interviewed were just trying to make a buck. But one thing I noticed, she interviewed a lot of people about a lot of things. The one type of person she didn't interview was a mental health professional. The one person who would know about grief. Right? And how that works. That to me seems really suspicious. That we're talking about something that's kind of edgy, kind of unknown, never done before, to deal with a very difficult human trauma. But yet we're not talking to people who are trained to say ‘hey, would this help?’. So I don't know. Maybe they would say yes, actually. In limited uses. This could have beneficial results.

Matt: So there's studies which have been done with online mental health support products. You make an appointment with the service, and you talk, you're texting. It's like a chat service. And you're talking to the product. One test that they did earlier this year was to test a co-pilot experience with a human assisted AI. And there's a technical optimization you get from that. You get faster response times, and you ultimately greater survey satisfaction from the patient.

A: What is this? Is it like online counseling?

Matt: Their service is not an AI counseling thing, but they did a test to see what the results of implementing AI would be. So like I say, they were able to respond faster. But ultimately they pulled the test, very quickly. Because it's this idea that it can't be empathic, faster. Empathy is an inherently thoughtful, slow thing. And that's, in many ways, the antithesis of what the technology provides. Where somebody's thinking or even just the beat where they say nothing. And they just listen. Because if you're in that kind of position where you're seeking counseling, in many instances, you just want to be heard and just want somebody to listen to you. And you don't even need the other person to talk. So I think when it came to that, they realized that, despite all the benefits the technology might bring from an efficiency perspective, it was strongly and deeply inauthentic. It's like when the computer says ‘that sounds as if it must be really hard’. You don't buy it.

Humans As Deeply Communal Beings

A: I was listening to a political commentator. He said, you know, everybody says they’re scared about AI, and nobody's gonna have jobs anymore. It's like, you go to a restaurant. It's not a robot dinner, you want a person. There's a reason people want the real life interaction, right? There are still people at the supermarket even though it's way faster to go to the self checkout. There's people that still go to the person and I would prefer it. I'm also wanting to leave quickly, so I usually go to the quick checkout, but I prefer the experience of the human, because we're human. And we're political, we're communal beings. That's the fundamental original use of the term political. That we live in communal relation to each other. And people want that. So, something like a counselor, I don't really see humans connecting with a robot in that way. I mean, we've seen instances where people have connected with chatbots, and everybody's like, that's kind of weird, right? And there's something that's just apparently disordered. You don't even have to create a long sophisticated argument. You see it and you just realize, right not that's not human. There's something off there.

Matt: I think some of the ethical conflict comes when you don't know that it's not human. And the rate at which believability is becoming possible. I think about something like the movies for this. We're very comfortable with representations of de-aging. I'm looking forward to the new Indiana Jones movie, and there's a young Harrison Ford that's going to be in that movie. It's part of the story. It’s not him, but it's him originally. It's him run through the computer to make him look 30 years younger. It's a flashback. But then there's also the capability to bring actors that have passed back to life the same way. We could we could have a new Marilyn Monroe movie. But should we? Who gets to decide that?

A: That's actually interesting, because that begs the question of, where's the line between innovation and impact, and not being perceivable as innovation anymore? Right. They're both just digital representations.

Matt: The whole thing is theater anyway. The classic example is Forrest Gump, where they put him in the historical film of him shaking hands with Kennedy. None of that is real. But somehow we're more accepting of that. Because the frame of that is immediately apparent. But with grief counseling products, the frame is different.

A: The acting thing doesn't doesn't initially bother me as much. The example of not knowing from a very mundane perspective. If I call up customer service, there is going to be a point where I'm not sure the difference between a cognitive human and an AI.

Matt: That point is today.

A: I don't like that. I do want to talk to a person.

Talking To Facsimiles

Matt: So let me let me let me keep going here. Because this is fascinating. What I put down here is that those building these technologies often talk about being able to speak to those who passed on, as we've been talking about, as a modern extension of what we already do by hanging family photographs. That is, and this is their language, that it is remembrance reinvented. And so they position it in their marketing. Memory is a critical means by which we honor those who have passed away, but it's also one of the strongest ways that we honor the events of the past. Our memory keeps our faith alive. But if we can recall past loved ones simply by opening up an app to talk to them, what do you think this might do to our perception of being able to talk to God?

A: As Catholics we created the saints. We talk to the saints, we are talking to them at mass, in eucharistic prayer. But do we know which loved ones have gone to heaven? We don't know. It hurts to not know. We don't always know where they are. But that doesn't mean we can't talk to them. That they can't hear us. So if we just skip over to that, to try to get the certainty, we use this facsimile. I can literally hear their voice.

Matt: What I'm trying to get at here is our ability to talk here, which is a critical part. We hear the voice and in the case of a loved one who's passed on, being able to hear them again is synthetic. In this case. And I don't mean seeing them in a video and hearing them. I mean, actually having a conversation.

Silence And Numbing Pain

A: I think in the culture, there's a breakdown overall of any ability to pray. Partly because we're not holding ourselves to anything that's not easy. I referenced a little bit before, but I can give you the example of where I gave this thought and this idea is from the Catholic theologian Christopher West. He does a lot of stuff with theology, the body, the theology of how God made us as a people. Part of his conversion where he was pretty into the party scene in college.

In one weekend, he decided to go to all the parties but not to drink, and just observe. Just to watch, the entire weekend. And he said, it blew him away because he realized that the people weren't having as much fun as they thought they were having. And so we all have ways we numb ourselves to the pain around us. They were numbing themselves to their pain. They say some people really drink to remember, but some people drink to forget. Right? Alcohol is a very clear example of a numbing agent, because it literally numbs us. But we numb ourselves with any number of things. We all have our own numbing agents that we use to avoid our pain.

So I've often tended to numb myself with YouTube, right? I have to keep keep tabs on that and discipline myself as to when I'm going to do that. Why don't like that. We have lost the ability to sit in silence. Silence is painful in a lot of ways. Until you get used to it. Once you get used to it, it’s intoxicating, it’s beautiful.

There’s that great song that talks about this is called Car Radio by 21 Pilots. It's a really well done song. And it's all about him driving the car, wanting to forget everything that's going through his mind and wishing that somebody hadn't stolen his car radio, because now he just sits in silence. So it's a whole song about how he wants to drown out his pain. But he can't. He has to face it because he doesn't have a radio. It's a beautiful sight. It's very emotional. It's very intense, but it's really, really well done. He's a very good artist.

A Missed Opportunity To Go Deeper Into God

I think that's the groundwork that we're looking at when we approach prayer. Prayer begins in silence even when it's vocal prayer, right? Before Mass, what do we do? We pray in silence. We recollect and prepare ourselves for the sacred liturgy. So everything begins from silence. And ultimately, the highest forms of prayer are silent prayer. So our relationship with God is a real relationship. But it's different, because we don't we tend to talk with him. I think the problem can be if we drown out, if we try to fill our time with something that's really just a coping mechanism, we won't go to God. We lose the opportunity. There's an opportunity there and again, that's where Christians have diverged from the rest of the world. We see pain, and we feel pain, and we think where is God asking me to look more deeply? Where is God inviting me into his life? Through this pain, right? So we don't see pain anymore as something totally futile. We see it as an opportunity to go deeper into God.

Matt: I think the point you're making here is that pain is one of the things that makes us most alive, and most human. It's an essential part of what it means to be here. And the products that we're talking about here mask…

A: Pain isn’t good in itself. But it's a necessary part of human experience. Because ultimately pain comes from love. It comes from desire for good. Saint Thomas Aquinas, lays out seven fundamental emotions. That complex emotion is similarly complex towards a difficult good and the simple emotions towards a simple good. And so for the simple emotions, the first emotion is love. Love is the first. You see it, you love it, then you desire it. Right? And then if you attain it, you have joy. Right. But if you don't attain it, it branches. It's the deprivation of something we desire. That's where pain comes from. Because there is some desire, that has not been met.

What is our ultimate desire? God. God is the fulfillment of all desire. All these things that God has created, which are good, even each other. We are all goods to each other. The highest good is friendship, right? The highest earthly good. They reflect God's goodness, all in different ways. Even the rock, even insofar as it existed, glorifies God. There's a beauty to the geode and its crystalline structure right? To sandstone and its smoothness right? And we see those in the higher bits of friendship, but those things we believe are subordinated to goodness. Right? They they should point us to God.

The Importance Of Authentic Experience And Human Emotion

And so, if we see these things out of order, then it messes us up. But ultimately like sorrow, sorrow is only there because we desire, and if we don't authentically allow ourselves to experience sorrow. That's what repression is, so there's a neuroticism which comes ultimately from emotional repression. Any kind of negativity is seen as evil. Negative emotions. You only have to affirm, and always affirm in every case. That's not human. It’s not true because negative emotions are a part of authentic human existence. Sometimes, you're saying sometimes things are bad, you know? And so we need to experience authentically, vividly, the full range of human emotion. And that's what these things are working against. That's the problem.

I think when somebody is in pain, you want to have no choice. It's okay to cry. It's not okay. But it's not right. But ultimately, what does it mean to be saying you're wrong for feeling sad? She's in a better place. But I don't know that actually. We wish we did. But ultimately, even deep more deeply, you're saying oh, it's fine. Don't be sad. You have no right to be sad. But ultimately, that's the disconnect.

What we should say is, that is really sad. And I'm sorry. I wish there was something I could say to make it better but there isn't because this is sad. And it's painful. Right? Welcoming in the authentic experience of someone's pain and saying that's what you're experiencing is real. It's valid, and it hurts. And I’d like to be there with you in it. But I'm not going to pretend that I can fix it. Or that it should be fixed. You can’t get over this in 30 seconds. If you did, how much did you really love that person?

Matt: And that's what I was saying about the faster empathy of artificial intelligence being inauthentic. For that to be somehow optimized. It's not real. It's not a task. It's not something to be completed. I have one more question for you if that's okay. One of the things I wrote here was about ritual, the importance of rituals. Much of what we're talking about here with artificial intelligence feels as if it's the future arriving at an alarming rate. I think that we feel a lot of that, and a lot of our discomfort in the future arriving with this kind of technology. So the technologies of grief often feel as if they sit at this sort of uncomfortable intersection between the two in your work with with the bereaved. What role do you feel technology has to offer? And how does that relate to the church's current use of technology? And how it thinks about things like the internet and stuff like that as a way of communicating with people or reaching people?

A: I just heard some statistics that for, I think it was 25 to 55 year olds, it was 70% wanted to go back to a simpler time. And even among Gen Z, I think it was 66% wanted a simpler life. I think we can often underestimate the natural desires of humanity. And I think naturally, people are seeing something that's actually disconnected in how they use technology. Technology is not evil. It’s great. Technology's good. And the wheel is technology. Right? And that's something we've had for 1000s of years. But the question is, how do we use technology?

Matt: The technology is really reshaping social norms.

A: My point of bringing up social media earlier is I think people are realizing that's not right. I think as much as that's trying to peak, I think its strength is starting to wane already. I'm not trying to avoid the question, but as a way of answering it, I don't think the technology has as much place as the people creating it. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that the desire for technology in our lives is weakening. We're desiring to tone it down a bit. The way I use it, I am the most boring person. I don't have anything interesting. The most exciting thing I have on here is email.

So for me, this is great because if I'm away and I have an hour and a half, I can start working on my weekend homily. So for me, I am able to use this in a way that I don't have an attachment to it personally. To me it's not super interesting. So we all have to decide what our tolerance is and what we can use. I prefer the dumb phone. And I looked at it for a while. I may eventually do that. That’s because there's something to having a dedicated device for each thing. I have a GPS, I have a camera, and I have a phone.

Matt: When I was growing up, my mom always told me don't get into cars with strangers. Now I spend money to summon somebody and pay a premium for it. Because I just want to go home faster. To think that that is completely normalized now. What you're describing with your phone is the complete opposite of what my 13 year old daughter does. She is completely in it. That's her primary interface to her friends, and it’s not good, you know? We try to curb the use of it and limit the hours, but it does bring some joy for her. It's hard not to use it as a punishment sometimes.

A: As kids grow, you can't control them. But when kids are really young, you train them, right? Not that they're animals. You use habit and reward and punishment. But as they grow older, we need to try to teach our children so that they can learn and teach. Hey, this is not new for me. They're always going to be irresponsible because they're influenced and they're concerned by things that aren't grounded in reality.

Matt: We do our best. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much.

A: I’m not sure if I really answered that last question.

Matt: I'm not really sure that there is an answer for any of this. It just is. We're just trying to make sense of it as the world turns around us with this stuff. Thank you again, I really appreciate your time.