What he has done in the past decade or so, on the other hand, is deeply disappointing.
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.
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).
Everyone just wants to attack whoever is in the spotlight at the moment, no matter who it is or what they are saying
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.
There’s no winners in a debate about a concept nobody agrees on the definition of
The whole tradition around studying and debating this is lost when it becomes a public debate
LLM's aren't conscious, therefore consciousness must be in the "gaps" of LLM's abilities. So I can confidently state that "consciousness is by definition [gap in LLM ability]".
But none of this holds water, because we have no test for consciousness because we don't know what consciousness is, so "by definition" we have no definition.
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).
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)
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.
All else being equal, this raises my confidence in both Dawkins in general and whatever the hell he said about AI consciousness.
The author makes it easy for himself by degrading the philosophical/scientific discussion into a political rant.
MarkusQ•1h ago
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•1h ago
> 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•1h ago
InsideOutSanta•1h ago
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•16m ago
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.