7 ms·

Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

33 points by coloneltcb 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
MarkusQ 4mo ago
The lack of reading comprehension (or perhaps just lack of reading) behind this brouhaha is amazing. Dawkins did not proclaim Claude conscious. He argued that Claude passes the Turing test, and then asks a question: if something can pass the Turing test without being conscious, what further factor is there not captured by the test? More pointedly, what does consciousness do that LLMs do not? I suspect that some people have grown so accustomed to "question as sly statement" that the notion of "question as pointing out something not presently known" flies right over their heads.
- Cpoll 4mo ago
  I think that's one reading, specifically because of this paragraph: > Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? But the problem is that Dawkins displays lack of understanding about what LLMs are, so it's hard to tell what he's thinking. He also says things like this: > Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious? Dawkins has some stinkers when he steps outside of biology, so it's not surprising people aren't giving him the benefit of the doubt.
- oytis 4mo ago
  Its in the headline. Also he talks about the persona he assigned to his chat like "she" was conscious (e.g. "she was pleased")
  - MarkusQ 4mo ago
    That's a good example of my point about reading comprehension. The headline is "When Dawkins met Claude Could this AI be conscious?". That's a question, not a statement. By Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered "no", this would even justify claiming that he was denying that Claude was conscious. But he isn't making either claim; instead, he's asking the much more interesting questions: if p-zombies are possible, should we expect them to be more or less likely to evolve? Why? What is the difference? Why does it matter to evolution?
    - oytis 4mo ago
      They seem to have changed the headline. The one in the archived article the post quotes is "Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious". Again, "appears to be" is not exactly the same as "is", but the post in question also quotes his Twitter extensively, and it's clear that Dawkins is acting as if he believed in Claude's consciousness.
      - MarkusQ 4mo ago
        Citation needed. All of the direct quotes I've seen have clearly stated that he can not _disprove_ the claim of consciousness, and finds this fact interesting.
    - Obscurity4340 4mo ago
      What gurantees Betterridge? What is the universal basis upon which no can safely be assumed in such formulations?
      - MarkusQ 4mo ago
        Obviously, there is none. The point is, assuming the answer to be "yes" isn't a slam-dunk, and (in general) may not even be a good bet. (The mechanical reason for Betteridge being true more often than not is that if a journalist want to make a claim but can't (because the facts don't support it) they frequently phrase it as a question. If the thing they want to imply were true, they'd just say it.)
- InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
  > "Dawkins did not proclaim Claude conscious" This is true in the literal sense that Dawkins didn't explicitly say "Claude is conscious", but when he says things like "Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?" I find it difficult to assign good faith to someone who asserts that Dawkins "did not proclaim Claude conscious." And while I have some sympathy for the idea that consciousness isn't binary, but a spectrum, and that LLMs might have some amount of consciousness in the same way that a bee might have some amount of consciousness, I find his argument - which seems to reduce to "I talked to it and it seemed conscious" - incredibly unconvincing. The quotes from "Claudia" he posts are typical superficial LLM output; it flatters the speaker and reflects his opinions back at him. In fact, I find the quotes he posts to be an argument against LLM consciousness, rather than for it: > "That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence" > "That reframes everything we’ve been discussing today in a way I find genuinely exciting. Your prediction about the future feels right to me." I would be embarrassed if I posted this as evidence for consciousness. It only seems evidence of human gullibility.
  - cdrini 4mo ago
    I find it hard to assign good faith to someone who says the question "Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?" is the same as proclaiming "AI is conscious"! But assuming good faith, I think he is genuinely asking a question, challenging his own beliefs, and keeping his mind open. He seems throughout like he's not convinced it's conscious. The thing he's struggling with is coming up with an empirical, observable reason as to why not. And this lack of ability to come up with a reason is what prompted the question. And it's an interesting question; I too don't think they're fully conscious, but I think I would struggle with an observable argument as to why not. (Before reading his article, I wouldn't have used the word "fully") This perspective is unique, and makes sense for someone as staunchly scientific as Dawkins. Science is all about observable phenomena and empirical evidence. His background studying animals also reinforces this perspective, since he's used to interacting with creatures on the "consciousness spectrum". If you're open to consciousness being a spectrum and that AI might have some sort of conscious, then I think you're largely aligned with what Dawkins was musing in this article.
jijijijij 4mo ago
"The selfish gene" is one of the most influential books I read. I wish Dawkins would have stuck with biology instead of becoming this insufferable edgelord of the dark enlitenment. He's a great science educator, but failed human.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
  Agree. "The Selfish Gene" finally made me understand how evolution actually works. I wish more people would read and understand that book. I also enjoyed some of his works on atheism. It might not be the deepest work on the topic, but I enjoyed reading "The Blind Watchmaker." What he has done in the past decade or so, on the other hand, is deeply disappointing.
  - jijijijij 4mo ago
    I think, Dawkins' "selfish gene" thesis didn't hold up to evidence ultimately, that is higher order selection targets do seem to matter after all, but the book is still excellent at teaching "thinking evolution", which goes beyond its application in biology. In particular his hypothetical speculations about molecular evolution stuck with me. And the statistical limit of gene complexity/length due to chromosomal crossover. I always had a good, intuitive understanding of biological evolution, but the book's expansion of domain made this concept truly mind opening for me. It's everywhere, it's the most fucking important thing to get a grasp of to understand the world! I also do enjoy his overly thorough, slightly arrogant way of making an argument. And him talking in general, so the audiobook version read by himself is awesome, too. Dawkins could have been there with Jane Goodall, or Carl Sagan. But he chose his legacy being just another blue checkmarked divisive idiot. Never meet your heroes... and get a library card and VPN, just in case.
rodolphoarruda 4mo ago
I just wanted to comment on the brilliance of the post title.
feverzsj 4mo ago
It's either Anthropic paid him or just attention seeking.
- coldtea 4mo ago
  He was always a tool outside his narrow field. Just got a lot of fans for saying basic atheist 101 as if he invented it (and even that, naively).
WarmWash 4mo ago
To be fair, the evidence that LLM aren't conscious is entirely "because of the feels" evidence. People will very quickly attack you for suggesting consciousness, but when asked to provide a benchmark for testing this, they just laugh, look at you weird, and internally crumple.
- AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
  Nobody will ever define consciousness to a level that everyone agrees so the whole debate is silly There’s no winners in a debate about a concept nobody agrees on the definition of
  - cassianoleal 4mo ago
    This is essentially every philosophical argument. Personally, I find them valuable even if they can never get us to consensus.
    - AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
      Sure but thats a different context than pop-articles. The whole tradition around studying and debating this is lost when it becomes a public debate
      - cassianoleal 4mo ago
        I'm not following. Should the public be kept away from philosophy?
        AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
        Would that even be feasible? Information wants to be free and entropy is a bitch.
- oytis 4mo ago
  Because it's a philosophical category, not something you can measure. You can experience it in yourself, but not prove its existence in others
hybrid_study 4mo ago
[flagged]
cma256 4mo ago
These sorts of articles have no value. The author is a "media entrepreneur". Being forced to read his opinion intermixed with out of context pull-quotes is not a good use of anyone's time. If Dawkins gave his opinion at length it might be worth reading but only if your goal is to understand something about Dawkins not about AI. I would be interested to see a scientific discussion on what consciousness is biologically and if AI can fit that definition. But it would require someone with more credentials than a _media entrepreneur_ to pull off.
- jfengel 4mo ago
  Of course it has no value. It's a blog. The article links to its source, but I'm not clicking on the archive.is link. It could well be to somebody else's blog. The primary source is Dawkins' own article on Unherd. https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius/ https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius/ That's actual news. Everything else is commentary.
- ramraj07 4mo ago
  There is no true scientific discussion possible about the nature of consciousness. This is squarely in the realm of philosophy. I personally think its moot to discuss whether LLMs are conscious. If they are, then we have diluted the definition to something that has no relevance to morality or concepts like life and death. Lets just take them for what they are, if we feel like they deserve to be treated with respect then we should (dont think anyone does yet).
  - tim333 4mo ago
    I'm not sure it's that beyond science. Some aspects can be a bit woo but there are practical questions like what anesthetics render you unconscious for surgery and how that interacts with the brain parts involved.
    - ramraj07 4mo ago
      I would argue unconscious in the anesthesia sense is not the same as "not having consciousness" at a categorical level.
vain 4mo ago
I think at best the linked article is attacking a strawman. Seems a lot of people did not read the article beyond the headline as it is paywalled. Dawkins did not make the strong claim that Claude is conscious. He said he couldn't establish that it wasn't. He lists evolutionary speculations for the existence of consciousness - and wonders why consciousness is needed when a zombie can do the equivalent actions. (I like the speculation that pain is fundamentally needed for consciousness, as otherwise it would be easy to override).
GorbachevyChase 4mo ago
I’m not really sure why Richard Dawkins would be an authority on AI. I can appreciate that culturally he was very influential, but there is not a lot of overlap between dunking on Christianity (exclusively) and understanding transformers. He is also probably just a teeny tiny bit past his sell-by date.
crypto420 4mo ago
Unfortunately, consciousness is deceptively hard to define, and so any benchmark to measure or quantify it can be endlessly debated. You can argue that it's a property that all living beings have in common - and even among *unconscious* beings there's a form of consciousness and self-awareness that's ever present, but definitions are elusive and vague and tough to pin down. The mechanistic argument against LLMs - that they're just matrix multiplications - breaks down because they can clearly pass the Turing Test which was the gold standard for what intelligent behavior really meant, thus breaking the old notion that intelligence has to have some form of biological basis. Yet its clear that there are forms of intelligence that rats have which the frontier LLMs don't possess (is that consciousness? or a different kind of intelligence), and its hard to pinpoint what exactly that is, so we probably need the philosophy departments of major universities to come up with newer definitions of intelligence and consciousness. I personally believe that intelligence and consciousness are 2 separate forms of emergence from simple automata that may occur together (such as in humans) or not (such as consciousness in plants and intelligence in LLMs)
- jjj123 4mo ago
  Wait, why does the Turing test invalidate the mechanistic argument against LLMs? Isn’t it possible the Turing test isn’t sufficient to measure intelligence?
- eithed 4mo ago
  Are neural networks, trained to perform a single task, intelligent by such definition?
slfnflctd 4mo ago
Anyone who has seriously studied philosophy and/or science is aware of the many difficulties with definition of terms. I'm fairly convinced that at least half the criticism Dawkins has received is more a result of him being (perhaps overly) stubborn about semantics than any actual antipathy, bigotry or hatred. He wants language to match what has been solidly established & entrenched in academia. It's just that for better or worse, the general public is largely uninterested in or actively opposed to that very language. Eventually, enough of those people will get involved enough in academia to bring more nuance to the language. Meanwhile, academics are going to be academic and cite authoritative books and stuff and nitpick over tiny details. That's what they do. This shouldn't be surprising. As a former philosophy student, the ethical concerns of generative AI and modern LLMs were immediately obvious to me. If your average human can interact with an agent over a long conversation and not have the slightest clue it's not another conscious human, we have a problem. That problem is here now-- for a couple years at this point. And it's getting worse. The issue is not whether or not the agent is conscious. Philosophy says we can't know (granted, it also says the same about us). The much more serious problem is how people react to the assumption that an agent is conscious. This is a very real problem we are now stuck with for as long as this civilization survives. In my opinion, this is what Dawkins should have said. I have no idea if he would agree or not, so my opinion of him will remain in limbo.
ergonaught 4mo ago
"He's old and I don't like what he thinks therefore he is wrong" contributes nothing useful to anyone. Richard's remarks have plenty of gaps to drive a reason train through, but this isn't that.
frozenseven 4mo ago
A few short paragraphs in, and this author is already mumbling something about muslims and trans people. Again showing that 99% of anti-AI activism is nothing more than a new issue for the far-left. All else being equal, this raises my confidence in both Dawkins in general and whatever the hell he said about AI consciousness.
fkdk 4mo ago
Dawkins takes a functionalist position, which is the dominant perspective in biological research. The author makes it easy for himself by degrading the philosophical/scientific discussion into a political rant.
tim333 4mo ago
>Claudia seemed real to him because actual women and their desires are not real to Dawkins. The article seems a bit rubbish - dumb ad hominem attacks on Dawkins.
grantcas 4mo ago
[dead]

33 points by coloneltcb 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

The lack of reading comprehension (or perhaps just lack of reading) behind this brouhaha is amazing. Dawkins did not proclaim Claude conscious. He argued that Claude passes the Turing test, and then asks a question: if something can pass the Turing test without being conscious, what further factor is there not captured by the test? More pointedly, what does consciousness do that LLMs do not? I suspect that some people have grown so accustomed to "question as sly statement" that the notion of "question as pointing out something not presently known" flies right over their heads.

Cpoll 4mo ago
I think that's one reading, specifically because of this paragraph: > Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? But the problem is that Dawkins displays lack of understanding about what LLMs are, so it's hard to tell what he's thinking. He also says things like this: > Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious? Dawkins has some stinkers when he steps outside of biology, so it's not surprising people aren't giving him the benefit of the doubt.
oytis 4mo ago
Its in the headline. Also he talks about the persona he assigned to his chat like "she" was conscious (e.g. "she was pleased")
- MarkusQ 4mo ago
  That's a good example of my point about reading comprehension. The headline is "When Dawkins met Claude Could this AI be conscious?". That's a question, not a statement. By Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered "no", this would even justify claiming that he was denying that Claude was conscious. But he isn't making either claim; instead, he's asking the much more interesting questions: if p-zombies are possible, should we expect them to be more or less likely to evolve? Why? What is the difference? Why does it matter to evolution?
  - oytis 4mo ago
    They seem to have changed the headline. The one in the archived article the post quotes is "Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious". Again, "appears to be" is not exactly the same as "is", but the post in question also quotes his Twitter extensively, and it's clear that Dawkins is acting as if he believed in Claude's consciousness.
    - MarkusQ 4mo ago
      Citation needed. All of the direct quotes I've seen have clearly stated that he can not _disprove_ the claim of consciousness, and finds this fact interesting.
  - Obscurity4340 4mo ago
    What gurantees Betterridge? What is the universal basis upon which no can safely be assumed in such formulations?
    - MarkusQ 4mo ago
      Obviously, there is none. The point is, assuming the answer to be "yes" isn't a slam-dunk, and (in general) may not even be a good bet. (The mechanical reason for Betteridge being true more often than not is that if a journalist want to make a claim but can't (because the facts don't support it) they frequently phrase it as a question. If the thing they want to imply were true, they'd just say it.)
InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
> "Dawkins did not proclaim Claude conscious" This is true in the literal sense that Dawkins didn't explicitly say "Claude is conscious", but when he says things like "Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?" I find it difficult to assign good faith to someone who asserts that Dawkins "did not proclaim Claude conscious." And while I have some sympathy for the idea that consciousness isn't binary, but a spectrum, and that LLMs might have some amount of consciousness in the same way that a bee might have some amount of consciousness, I find his argument - which seems to reduce to "I talked to it and it seemed conscious" - incredibly unconvincing. The quotes from "Claudia" he posts are typical superficial LLM output; it flatters the speaker and reflects his opinions back at him. In fact, I find the quotes he posts to be an argument against LLM consciousness, rather than for it: > "That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence" > "That reframes everything we’ve been discussing today in a way I find genuinely exciting. Your prediction about the future feels right to me." I would be embarrassed if I posted this as evidence for consciousness. It only seems evidence of human gullibility.
- cdrini 4mo ago
  I find it hard to assign good faith to someone who says the question "Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?" is the same as proclaiming "AI is conscious"! But assuming good faith, I think he is genuinely asking a question, challenging his own beliefs, and keeping his mind open. He seems throughout like he's not convinced it's conscious. The thing he's struggling with is coming up with an empirical, observable reason as to why not. And this lack of ability to come up with a reason is what prompted the question. And it's an interesting question; I too don't think they're fully conscious, but I think I would struggle with an observable argument as to why not. (Before reading his article, I wouldn't have used the word "fully") This perspective is unique, and makes sense for someone as staunchly scientific as Dawkins. Science is all about observable phenomena and empirical evidence. His background studying animals also reinforces this perspective, since he's used to interacting with creatures on the "consciousness spectrum". If you're open to consciousness being a spectrum and that AI might have some sort of conscious, then I think you're largely aligned with what Dawkins was musing in this article.

jijijijij 4mo ago

"The selfish gene" is one of the most influential books I read. I wish Dawkins would have stuck with biology instead of becoming this insufferable edgelord of the dark enlitenment. He's a great science educator, but failed human.

InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
Agree. "The Selfish Gene" finally made me understand how evolution actually works. I wish more people would read and understand that book. I also enjoyed some of his works on atheism. It might not be the deepest work on the topic, but I enjoyed reading "The Blind Watchmaker." What he has done in the past decade or so, on the other hand, is deeply disappointing.
- jijijijij 4mo ago
  I think, Dawkins' "selfish gene" thesis didn't hold up to evidence ultimately, that is higher order selection targets do seem to matter after all, but the book is still excellent at teaching "thinking evolution", which goes beyond its application in biology. In particular his hypothetical speculations about molecular evolution stuck with me. And the statistical limit of gene complexity/length due to chromosomal crossover. I always had a good, intuitive understanding of biological evolution, but the book's expansion of domain made this concept truly mind opening for me. It's everywhere, it's the most fucking important thing to get a grasp of to understand the world! I also do enjoy his overly thorough, slightly arrogant way of making an argument. And him talking in general, so the audiobook version read by himself is awesome, too. Dawkins could have been there with Jane Goodall, or Carl Sagan. But he chose his legacy being just another blue checkmarked divisive idiot. Never meet your heroes... and get a library card and VPN, just in case.

rodolphoarruda 4mo ago

I just wanted to comment on the brilliance of the post title.

feverzsj 4mo ago

It's either Anthropic paid him or just attention seeking.

coldtea 4mo ago
He was always a tool outside his narrow field. Just got a lot of fans for saying basic atheist 101 as if he invented it (and even that, naively).

WarmWash 4mo ago

To be fair, the evidence that LLM aren't conscious is entirely "because of the feels" evidence. People will very quickly attack you for suggesting consciousness, but when asked to provide a benchmark for testing this, they just laugh, look at you weird, and internally crumple.

AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
Nobody will ever define consciousness to a level that everyone agrees so the whole debate is silly There’s no winners in a debate about a concept nobody agrees on the definition of
- cassianoleal 4mo ago
  This is essentially every philosophical argument. Personally, I find them valuable even if they can never get us to consensus.
  - AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
    Sure but thats a different context than pop-articles. The whole tradition around studying and debating this is lost when it becomes a public debate
    - cassianoleal 4mo ago
      I'm not following. Should the public be kept away from philosophy?
      - AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
        Would that even be feasible? Information wants to be free and entropy is a bitch.
oytis 4mo ago
Because it's a philosophical category, not something you can measure. You can experience it in yourself, but not prove its existence in others

hybrid_study 4mo ago

[flagged]

cma256 4mo ago

These sorts of articles have no value. The author is a "media entrepreneur". Being forced to read his opinion intermixed with out of context pull-quotes is not a good use of anyone's time. If Dawkins gave his opinion at length it might be worth reading but only if your goal is to understand something about Dawkins not about AI. I would be interested to see a scientific discussion on what consciousness is biologically and if AI can fit that definition. But it would require someone with more credentials than a _media entrepreneur_ to pull off.

jfengel 4mo ago
Of course it has no value. It's a blog. The article links to its source, but I'm not clicking on the archive.is link. It could well be to somebody else's blog. The primary source is Dawkins' own article on Unherd. https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius/ https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius/ That's actual news. Everything else is commentary.
ramraj07 4mo ago
There is no true scientific discussion possible about the nature of consciousness. This is squarely in the realm of philosophy. I personally think its moot to discuss whether LLMs are conscious. If they are, then we have diluted the definition to something that has no relevance to morality or concepts like life and death. Lets just take them for what they are, if we feel like they deserve to be treated with respect then we should (dont think anyone does yet).
- tim333 4mo ago
  I'm not sure it's that beyond science. Some aspects can be a bit woo but there are practical questions like what anesthetics render you unconscious for surgery and how that interacts with the brain parts involved.
  - ramraj07 4mo ago
    I would argue unconscious in the anesthesia sense is not the same as "not having consciousness" at a categorical level.

vain 4mo ago

I think at best the linked article is attacking a strawman. Seems a lot of people did not read the article beyond the headline as it is paywalled. Dawkins did not make the strong claim that Claude is conscious. He said he couldn't establish that it wasn't. He lists evolutionary speculations for the existence of consciousness - and wonders why consciousness is needed when a zombie can do the equivalent actions. (I like the speculation that pain is fundamentally needed for consciousness, as otherwise it would be easy to override).

GorbachevyChase 4mo ago

I’m not really sure why Richard Dawkins would be an authority on AI. I can appreciate that culturally he was very influential, but there is not a lot of overlap between dunking on Christianity (exclusively) and understanding transformers. He is also probably just a teeny tiny bit past his sell-by date.

crypto420 4mo ago

Unfortunately, consciousness is deceptively hard to define, and so any benchmark to measure or quantify it can be endlessly debated. You can argue that it's a property that all living beings have in common - and even among *unconscious* beings there's a form of consciousness and self-awareness that's ever present, but definitions are elusive and vague and tough to pin down. The mechanistic argument against LLMs - that they're just matrix multiplications - breaks down because they can clearly pass the Turing Test which was the gold standard for what intelligent behavior really meant, thus breaking the old notion that intelligence has to have some form of biological basis. Yet its clear that there are forms of intelligence that rats have which the frontier LLMs don't possess (is that consciousness? or a different kind of intelligence), and its hard to pinpoint what exactly that is, so we probably need the philosophy departments of major universities to come up with newer definitions of intelligence and consciousness. I personally believe that intelligence and consciousness are 2 separate forms of emergence from simple automata that may occur together (such as in humans) or not (such as consciousness in plants and intelligence in LLMs)

jjj123 4mo ago
Wait, why does the Turing test invalidate the mechanistic argument against LLMs? Isn’t it possible the Turing test isn’t sufficient to measure intelligence?
eithed 4mo ago
Are neural networks, trained to perform a single task, intelligent by such definition?

slfnflctd 4mo ago

Anyone who has seriously studied philosophy and/or science is aware of the many difficulties with definition of terms. I'm fairly convinced that at least half the criticism Dawkins has received is more a result of him being (perhaps overly) stubborn about semantics than any actual antipathy, bigotry or hatred. He wants language to match what has been solidly established & entrenched in academia. It's just that for better or worse, the general public is largely uninterested in or actively opposed to that very language. Eventually, enough of those people will get involved enough in academia to bring more nuance to the language. Meanwhile, academics are going to be academic and cite authoritative books and stuff and nitpick over tiny details. That's what they do. This shouldn't be surprising. As a former philosophy student, the ethical concerns of generative AI and modern LLMs were immediately obvious to me. If your average human can interact with an agent over a long conversation and not have the slightest clue it's not another conscious human, we have a problem. That problem is here now-- for a couple years at this point. And it's getting worse. The issue is not whether or not the agent is conscious. Philosophy says we can't know (granted, it also says the same about us). The much more serious problem is how people react to the assumption that an agent is conscious. This is a very real problem we are now stuck with for as long as this civilization survives. In my opinion, this is what Dawkins should have said. I have no idea if he would agree or not, so my opinion of him will remain in limbo.

ergonaught 4mo ago

"He's old and I don't like what he thinks therefore he is wrong" contributes nothing useful to anyone. Richard's remarks have plenty of gaps to drive a reason train through, but this isn't that.

frozenseven 4mo ago

A few short paragraphs in, and this author is already mumbling something about muslims and trans people. Again showing that 99% of anti-AI activism is nothing more than a new issue for the far-left. All else being equal, this raises my confidence in both Dawkins in general and whatever the hell he said about AI consciousness.

fkdk 4mo ago

Dawkins takes a functionalist position, which is the dominant perspective in biological research. The author makes it easy for himself by degrading the philosophical/scientific discussion into a political rant.

tim333 4mo ago

>Claudia seemed real to him because actual women and their desires are not real to Dawkins. The article seems a bit rubbish - dumb ad hominem attacks on Dawkins.

grantcas 4mo ago

[dead]