Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

MarkusQ

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.

jijijijij

"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.

rodolphoarruda

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

feverzsj

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

cma256

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.

WarmWash

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.

vain

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

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

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)

slfnflctd

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

"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

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

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

>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.