Director of Operations | Data Consultant | Happy Hubby | Proud Papa | Ora et labora
South Carolina Lowcountry
Joined September 2007
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Do these four things as frequently as you can, and everything else will take care of itself…
1. Pray
2. Go to Mass
3. Receive the sacraments
4. Eucharistic Adoration
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
The next time someone tells you that markets are rational remember that in 2026 pretty much every company simultaneously announced that they were going to borrow a quadrillion dollars to build 420 data centers in six months with chips they didn’t have powered by electricity they couldn’t get from turbines that weren’t built sent through transmission lines that didn’t exist and everybody was like “Cool, cool. Sounds good. Solid plan.”
It’s crazy that a company that started with the motto, “don’t be evil,” is now basically a dystopian corporate super-villain.
Breaking: Google will turn off web search for schools that opt out of A.I. for kids.
nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/go…
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
Machines are tools, not persons. Today, some propose granting these systems rights, or even legal personhood. Such an approach risks obscuring human responsibility and leaving those who suffer harm to confront a faceless entity.
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
The future of #ArtificialIntelligence is not pre-determined. As a technology developed by human beings, its future depends on the choices we make. We therefore have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications. A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.
He is absolutely right, here. But many are going to oppose him primarily for the reason that the creators of LLMs want them to be conscious so that they can be gods. Because only God can create life. It’s literally a tale as old as time.
All of your comments about why my argument is weak revolve around proving consciousness, when my point is about disproving consciousness.
If someone claims an LLM is conscious, that claim must have testable implications. We can examine its architecture, inspect its mechanisms, run experiments, and test those implications against reality. When they fail, we should discount the premise and/or hypothesis.
We don’t have to accept consciousness as an explanation simply because someone believes it might exist.
Current LLMs fail to demonstrate many of the characteristics we associate with conscious experience. We definitively know this because humans created them. We understand their architectures, training processes, and inference mechanisms.
So let’s look at a few points, together they provide more than enough evidence to disprove consciousness.
1. An LLM has no demonstrated subjective awareness of its own existence. No feelings, emotions, or experienced sense of self. What occurs is computation using static weights, context, and mathematical operations.
2. An LLM’s weights don’t learn, grow, or evolve simply because you interact with it. During standard inference, they’re fixed parameters, not a changing dataset. The model doesn’t inherently remember previous API requests. Continuity comes from context history in subsequent requests. The model doesn’t gain experience, it doesn’t remember, it doesn’t learn. It is completely static, read-only, during inference.
3. Between inference requests, the LLM isn’t thinking. I don’t mean sleeping. I mean there’s no ongoing contemplation, self-reflection, or reconsideration of previous answers. Nothing. The model isn’t sitting around wondering whether it got something wrong or what the meaning of life is, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist.
4. These systems were created by people, and much of the underlying technology is open source. You can build your own models, examine implementations, study the architectures, learn how training materials and processes affect how it behaves, and even understand the mathematics behind it. You can see how training produces systems capable of remarkably convincing human-like language and behavior. None of those mechanisms requires consciousness to explain what we’re observing.
5. LLMs are not biological brains. Apples are not oranges, no matter how much you want them to be. Artificial neural networks were inspired in part by biological neuroscience, but their architectures and operating mechanisms are fundamentally different. Similarities in behavior do not establish equivalent internal architectures.
6. Humans are naturally inclined to recognize life and assume humanity in things that behave like us. We’re social creatures, and anthropomorphism comes naturally. But an LLM isn’t life. It can convincingly emulate feelings, care, and understanding without experiencing any of them. That doesn’t diminish the technology, that is what it was programmed to do.
I appreciate your perspective as a doctor and researcher, but without a solid understanding of LLM architecture and inference, it’s easy to confuse sophisticated emulation with conscious experience.
But don’t fall for it!
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
When they tell you sports gambling is harmless: no it isn't. Nicole Noren on why she left ESPN.
An important and poignant perspective on ESPN's embrace of sports gambling
cjr.org/the-interview/nicole…
Amazing.
A Knicks fan recreated OG Anunoby’s classic tip-in in their front yard for Halloween 🔥
(h/t @TommyBeer )
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
Happy Feast of Saint Therese of Lisieux!
About 6 hours and 9,960 days ago from the time I am writing this, I stepped into a Catholic church for the first time. I was brought there by my girlfriend on our first date. I knew nothing about Catholicism except for those features which were preserved in the protestant traditions my family retained, but by this point I was an atheist. I also did not know that my girlfriend was Catholic so when she said she had to go to Mass and that I could wait in the car if I wanted, I insisted joining her not knowing it was the beginning of a new life for me.
This experience was like stepping into a foreign world. I didn't have the language to even ask questions about what was happening. To be there, and with her, for the first time was providential. What I didn't know then, was that we were in the Church of the Little Flower, dedicated to the patronage of St. Therese. I had no idea what "Little Flower" meant or it's relation to Jesus, never heard the name of this Saint before, or even really knew what a Saint was. I didn't go seeking her, but she found us.
I would be baptized in that church just a couple of years later. We would also be married in that church just a year after that, and in time I would learn that it was not The Blessed Virgin Mary's statue high above the alta, but St. Therese, and I would learn of her story and would become deeply indebted to her in my own life, but also in my family's life. As we would have kids, one would take her name, and she would become the dedicated patron of our family and household.
Years later we travelled back to that church, and saw that they erected a small shrine just outside the parish to St. Therese, As we stepped up to admire the new addition to the parish grounds, we were blown away by the date of the dedication of that statue - our wedding anniversary.
Thank you St. Therese, for my faith, for my wife, for my kids, because I believe sincerely that it was through her intercession before Our Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven and that these graces were brought to fulfillment in our lives.
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barituscatholic.com
SHOP: barituscatholic.etsy.com
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
Canon 937: "Unless there is a grave reason to the contrary, the church in which the Most Holy Eucharist is reserved is to be open to the faithful for at least some hours each day, so that they are able to spend time in prayer before the Most Blessed Sacrament."
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
Modern ideologies need Christianity's moral force so they borrow its forms:
Marxism: salvation by revolution
Communism: eschaton as classless society
Progressivism: Providence as progress
Egalitarianism: imago Dei as sameness
Cancel culture: excommunication w/o return
This is true. The purpose of a University Education is the formation of the person. It was the Education Industrial Complex that turned the purpose into “getting a good job.” That’s a major reason for all of the current financial difficulties around college.
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
“He operates that we may will; and when we will, He cooperates that we may perfect.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I–II, q.111, a.2, quoting St. Augustine
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
Today, for the first time ever, the University of Notre Dame was consecrated to Sacred Heart of Jesus.
After celebrating Mass in an overflowing Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Bishop Kevin Rhoades led students, Holy Cross priests, faculty and members of the wider community in a Eucharistic procession around campus. Then, on “God Quad”, before a statue of the Sacred Heart that looks up to the Blessed Mother on the Golden Dome, Bishop Rhoades led the group in the act of consecration, with Notre Dame president Fr. Bob Dowd by his side.
Despite the Congregation of the Holy Cross and Notre Dame’s historic connection to the Sacred Heart, the university has never before been consecrated. And it likely wouldn’t have been today, without the initiative of students, who were inspired by the US bishops’ consecration of the nation, and approached ND administrators to do something similar on campus.
As Bishop Rhoades put it, “Devotion to the Sacred Heart is in the DNA of Notre Dame.”
And now, Our Lady’s university is consecrated to the Sacred Heart of her Son.
This is amazing. And also why having an American Pope is so cool…
Pope Leo XIV on the @VillanovaU vs @NotreDame basketball games to be played in Rome in November:
“They tell me that the people coming to the match, 90% are Villanova and 10% Notre Dame, so the voice of the people of God will be very strong on the Villanova side.”
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
There are countless CRISPR-like sequences hidden in genomes of many organisms (eg @Basecamp_Res). Well-known. Vast majority not interesting.
This isn’t a noteworthy discovery.
The hype level leads me to question how serious @AnthropicAI is about its biotech effort (I really hope it’s more than a PR stunt).
Today we announced the Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student. The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out.
It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years. In 2023 models struggled to do math at the level of an average high-school student. In 2024 they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025 they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026 they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend.
The main difference between biology and mathematics, of course, is that math can be done purely theoretically, while biology requires experimentation. Some have used this to draw the conclusion that AI’s utility in biology will be limited. We think this is wrong. As we’ve demonstrated today, humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if necessary, work with the AI to iterate on what they find. Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today (our lab is also a BSL1/BSL2 facility that doesn't handle materials dangerous to humans).
More broadly, biomedical advancement has many stages — from fundamental biology discoveries, to translational research, to drug discovery, clinical trials, and finally the actual delivery of medicines and health care to patients. We are also interested in these later stages, but even simply accelerating the first stage of fundamental biological discoveries has the potential to speed up and broaden the entire pipeline. Improving our understanding of biology and sharpening biologists’ tools can drive forward all of the later stages, for example by identifying new drug targets, finding new therapeutic modalities, allowing for more precise measurement, and speeding up the experimental loop which itself further accelerates our understanding of biology. This will not in itself speed up clinical trial times, but if it succeeds it could greatly increase the number of promising candidates that go into the pipeline — an increase in throughput even though latency remains.
In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to “cure most diseases in 5-10 years” — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries.
Claude’s discovery is the latest in a line of related prior work that goes back decades, beginning with systems like CRISPR, and continuing with discoveries like the bridge recombinase and VIPR in the past few years. Recently, there has been heightened interest in systems based on reverse transcriptase (RT) enzymes, the enzyme underlying the system Claude identified. And most recently, a Stanford team working independently described a novel RT system with an associated non-coding array that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found, though they are distinct systems that evolved independently from each other. I believe that we’re at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology.
I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences, and we’re aiming both to grow our life sciences team and to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems. If you have a proposal for a research collaboration or are interested in joining our life sciences team, please reach out.
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
While some European societies proudly brag about the systemic slaughter of these people in the womb, hoping to eradicate them forever, Pope Leo chooses to single them out and give them the honor of serving at the Mass.
This is the kind of man our Pope is.
"Le Pape va me bénir moi et toutes les personnes porteuses de trisomie 21. Je suis ravi et ça me touche vraiment !"🎙️
En invitant ces six jeunes porteurs de trisomie 21 à servir sa messe, le Pape fait un cadeau à la France et au monde entier 👉il leur révèle ceux qu’ils ne regardent plus.
#LinfodeVilno @CNEWS @Pierredevilno #LePapeEnFrance
Daniel Rothamel 🇻🇦 retweeted
Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI—keynote address to a national bioethics council in 1991, more relevant than ever:
"The loss of content...leads to a pure formalism of judgment. In many places today for example, no one bothers any longer to ask what a person thinks. The verdict on someone's thinking is ready at hand as long as you can assign it to its corresponding, formal category: conservative, reactionary, fundamentalist, progressive, revolutionary. Assignment to a formal scheme suffices to render unnecessary coming to terms with the content."