Dear Richard Dawkins

thinkingemote 20 points 3 comments May 03, 2026
dearricharddawkins.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (3 comments)

paulryanrogers

As we get older we seem to lose some critical thinking. We become more afraid. Celebrities fading from the spotlight often become desperate for attention. My guess is these factors are motivating Dawkins to grasp for any foothold as he slips into obscurity. A younger and less famous Dawkins may have been more skeptical of Claude.

meinersbur

Since ELIZA, the more we try to apply the Turing Test, the more evidence we get that the Turing Test about human gullibility, rather than saying anything meaningful about the machine [1,2]. Surprisingly it turns out that even critical thinker Richard Dawkins is quite gullible. [1] https://medium.com/@innovariart/the-turing-test-no-longer-me... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007

mrkeen

Dawkins declared himself unable to determine consciousness through the chat terminal , which is the reason the Turing test is relevant. Try imagining the same 'gotchas' in the original Turing test, (i.e. you're told beforehand you're talking to an AI, and you have insider knowledge of how AI works.) Then the role of the test-taker is to simply disregard the chat and to already know the answer. Dawkin's posts might be gross and out of touch, but let's at least get a proper rebuttal - what definition of consciousness, when applied to interactive chat, could differentiate a person from an LLM?

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