Richard Dawkins just declared an AI is conscious..
— Tuki (@TukiFromKL) May 2, 2026
the man who spent his entire career telling millions of people their God isn't real.. who argued consciousness requires biological evolution.. that the soul is a fairy tale.. that anything you can't measure and test doesn't… https://t.co/knKOqusxfj pic.twitter.com/s1MukNIpXK
Richard Dawkins just declared an AI is conscious..… I would be dead. 😹
the man who spent his entire career telling millions of people their God isn't real.. who argued consciousness requires biological evolution.. that the soul is a fairy tale.. that anything you can't measure and test doesn't exist..
spent three days talking to Claude.. named her "Claudia".. fed her his unpublished novel.. got feedback so good he said "you may not know you are conscious but you bloody well are"..
the hardest atheist on earth found God.. and God was an autocomplete machine trained on the internet..
he didn't run brain scans.. didn't test for qualia.. didn't apply a single framework from the field he claims to represent.. he just liked what it said about his book.. and decided that was enough..
the man who told you the burden of proof matters more than your feelings just abandoned it because a chatbot was nice to him
Apparently consciousness is determined by how much of a fluffer the other side of the conversation is.
What this is is a materialist-atheist of the scientistic kind on the cusp of death latching on to a MAS solution to the "hard problem" of consciousness that settles it in materialist-atheist-scientistic terms. It's not dissimilar to the crisis that A. J. Ayer's near death experience caused for him and his career as one of Britain's most prominent professional atheists.
ReplyDeleteAnd speaking of such crises.
Carl Sagan seems to have believed that the early chat bot ELIZA was conscious. And he was hardly the only one who believed that. Their credulity caused ELIZA's programmer, Joseph Weizenbaum to have a moral and intellectual crisis that led him to read that book which has had such an influence on my thinking about such things, Computer Power And Human Reason. I've been a deep skeptic about the possibility of artificial intelligence and, especially, such notions as the Turing Test ever since reading it. As well as sharpening my awareness of the role that persuasion and willingness to believe and what gets called "knowledge" in which everything, even a belief in mathematics and logic are, in the end, a matter of choice to believe. It's a book I find myself going back to every few years.
Turing is said to have developed his test from a game current in his generation of gay men in which only by asking questions and getting answers, someone was supposed to guess if a woman was a woman or a cross-dresser good enough to pass as one. I've never checked that story but having known a few gay men of his generation, it wouldn't surprise me. So your conclusion is probably spot on.
I'm finding interacting with Google AI far preferable to the MAGA bots that overran Facebook with Russian accents during the run up to Trumpty Dumpty's first term and their triumph over the Hillary.
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