Thread by @JPLindsley

🧵 In the 1920s, a brilliant philosopher named Edith Stein, later murdered at Auschwitz and now a Saint, asked the question that might save us from AI:

"How can I truly know that someone else is a 'self' like me?"

Stein's analysis is urgently needed. Here's why: 🧵⤵️

The tech bros building our AI future want us to abandon empathy.

Because empathy is the firewall: Without it, we become programmable objects in an economy that profits from stealing our most sacred resource: our attention. ⤵️

Elon Musk, therefore, calls empathy “civilizational suicide.”

MAGA preachers, perhaps paid by the tech bros, are calling empathy a sin.

But empathy isn’t surrender of the self. It's the opposite! ⤵️

Empathy is how we know someone else is real. It's how we know ourselves. Edith Stein, before Hitler killed her, pointed the way. ⤵️

In our attention economy, which Stein amazingly anticipated, we're losing our sense of self.

The TikToks in our palm feel as real as our neighbors.

Everything we experience, even dreaming, is REAL to us, because it's part of our experience. ⤵️

But without analytical empathy, we lose our sense of self. We need to understand whether emotions felt are OURS—or those of others.

Empathy is precisely about finding the line between SELF and OTHER. It is not, as Elon suggests, erasing your own identity. ⤵️

Edith Stein's 1916 breakthrough: Empathy is a rigorous act of consciousness that:

—Aims at the other (it's intentional)
—Preserves distance (doesn't collapse you into others, @elonmusk)
—Lets you grasp another's experience directly—but in a mediated way ⤵️

Stein’s process is the transcendental reduction:

1. Suspend bias: Observe how the other appears.

2. Reduce: Focus on what’s given in experience—face, tone, gesture.

3. See their feelings—which you know to be human from your experience—as theirs, not yours.

That’s empathy. ⤵️

Stein solves the "problem of other minds" that had stumped philosophers, including her mentor Husserl, for centuries.

You don't deduce that others have consciousness. You don't imagine it. You directly apprehend it through empathy—

Today this is THE necessary science. ⤵️

Stein gave us the criteria for recognizing genuine consciousness:

Can this Other be the subject of empathic perception?
Not "does it simulate emotions" but "can I encounter it as another I?" ⤵️

Pope Leo said he chose his name because of AI's rise.

The previous Pope Leo in the 19th century guided the world through industrialization. Now, Leo XIV wants to help us navigate the new things.

Stein's work on consciousness and empathy feels designed for this exact moment. ⤵️

Edith Stein was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.

Before that, this Jewish philosopher became a Catholic nun, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Pope John Paul II later named her one of Europe's six patron saints—the only one from the 20th century. ⤵️

Empathy disrupts control.

It asks dangerous questions:

Who made this system?
Who’s being erased?
Who still matters?

That’s why the globalist power lords want you to hate empathy.
To call it a sin. A liability. ⤵️

Here in wartime Ukraine, I have been attentively reading Stein's On the Problem of Empathy—which I have realized is the best tool to help me speak to people in far away USA about the reality here in Ukraine.

Read Stein here: ⤵️ stmaryscathedral.ca/wp-content/upl…

Edith Stein gave us the tools.
The only question left is:
Will we use them?

Or will we let those who profit from confusion convince us that our greatest strength—our ability to recognize consciousness—is our fatal flaw? ⤵️

The human future may depend on whether we can still ask:

"How can I truly know that someone else is a 'self' like me?" 🎬