Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

xvxvx

The man has wasted his precious time on earth trying to explain the meaning of life without accepting the existence of the soul. It makes total sense that he can be fooled by AI nonsense. To be 85 and lack basic wisdom is quite an astonishing achievement.

downbad_

I'll read this later. I've added it to my favorites. I'm a big fan of Dawkins.

Planktonne

It's been clear for a long time now that Dawkins was never actually very skeptical; he likes taking contrary positions based on spite more than reason, as can be seen from his increasing adoption of the religion he used to rail against [1]. At this point, 'person who is popularly thought to be intelligent thinks AI is conscious' should make you question the first part, not endorse the second. [1] https://ewtn.co.uk/article-famous-atheist-richard-dawkins-sa...

jrm4

Entirely unsurprising. At the risk of whatever, your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them. Even people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson don't go on and on about "atheism" for a reason; there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing."

habitue

I am confused about why Gary Marcus thinks it's so obvious that Claude isn't conscious. As he points out, Dawkins is just taking a bog-standard behaviorist position: that he can't distinguish Claude from a conscious being just by the behavior here. Marcus is saying "Well, if you knew they were trained to mimic, then you'd understand it's just mimicry and not real consciousness" The problem with this argument is that we just don't have a good idea what "real consciousness" is. What if, in order to simulate human text prediction with sufficient accuracy, the model has to assemble sub-networks internally into something equivalent to a conscious mind? We could disprove that kind of thing really quickly if we knew how to define consciousness really well, but we kinda don't! Philosophers are genuinely split on this question, it's totally reasonable to be on either side of this based on your personal intuition. Marcus's position seems to be actually based on his own personal incredulity, despite his claims that understanding LLM training methodology gives him some special insight into the internal experience (or lack thereof) of an LLM. (The Claude Delusion is a banger title though)

codeulike

Not particularly a Dawkins fan but I dont think OP really understands the philosophical point Dawkins is making. OP complains that Dawkins hasnt considered how LLMs work and how its obvious they're nothing like brains. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means. ... But its a longstanding position in philosophy (i.e. not everyone might take this position, but its a well known one) that discussion about consciousness should perhaps only really concern itself with the outputs. The gist of Dawkins short piece is basically "we always used the turing test as a yardstick for consciousness, it seemed unachievable for a long time. Now thats its been achieved, what is the rationale for moving the goalposts?". And I think thats an interesting point to make. Dawkins maintains that the Turing Test should be enough, by making a point about competence: Here's dawkins piece: https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution... Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness. .... 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? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?

nwhnwh

Nothing surprising.

bastawhiz

> Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing. I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR you say "what LLMs are doing is a counterfeit" which suggests a real output produced through different means. If I have a counterfeit Rolex, nobody denies that the watch can tell time. A counterfeit human isn't a human and it's not made by nature, but the implication is that it's effectively doing the same thing. That's a different thing than the author starts out saying. I think it's important that when you talk about consciousness, you pin down exactly what you mean. Does it require the entity to have a mechanism for experiencing emotion? For exhibiting reasoning ability? For exhibiting characteristics of common sense? I don't think it's a useful definition to say, flatly, "does the things an adult human does through the same mechanisms".

dekhn

I start from the assumption that I am a philosophical zombie, and that makes all this argument pretty irrelevant. More realistically, I'm in the camp that if we keep developing machine learning in the right directions, we may actually end up with something that generates emergent consciousness, or something indistinguishable from it, and the difference is not really that important to me.

kelseyfrog

I'm much more interested in determining if AI has Atman, Nous, Neshamah, or Vijñāna. Consciousness in comparison is relatively boring.