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When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

• mellosouls 5mo ago
  https://archive.ph/6RdK9 https://archive.ph/6RdK9
  • digitaltrees 5mo ago
    Feels like watching and esteemed scientists falling in love with a bot that’s telling him what he wants to hear because the system prompt said “be helpful”
    • SwellJoe 5mo ago
      I've begun to wonder if narcissism predisposes one to AI psychosis. It's probably not the only thing that leads there, I've seen normal seeming folks get there, too. But, a lot of the most unhinged takes I've seen thus far have been from people that are publicly very impressed with themselves. I would have assumed it would also require ignorance about how they work, but a few people who worked for AI companies have been canaries in the coalmine, falling prey to this kind of thing very early. I would have guessed they would have had enough understanding to know that there isn't a real girl in the computer, it's just matrix math and randomness. But, the first couple/few public bouts of AI psychosis were in nerds who work for AI companies.
      • zwischenzug 5mo ago
        Evidence for that? I remember there was a guy who worked for google that quit because he thought an LLM was conscious and we needed to talk about its rights, but that's the only example I am aware of.
• WalterGR 5mo ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988880 "Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in" (garymarcus.substack.com) 18 points | 2 hours ago | 16 comments
  • dang 5mo ago
    Also The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991340 - May 2026 (30 comments)
  • amelius 5mo ago
    So we know Claude is deterministic, but does that mean it is not conscious? Or what is the reasoning exactly?
    • throwaway27448 5mo ago
      It largely comes down to how you define the term. Personally, I think anything that includes software (...of only tepid determinism, as we do explicitly add pseudorandomness) is not a particularly useful term. Regardless, Dawkins seems to not have much interesting to add about the topic. A consistent theme for the last few decades, I must say.
• search_facility 5mo ago
  Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. Nothing else, by nature. Modern LLMs have the same math as in GPT-2 - just bigger and with extra stuff around - and math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots. It was build that way since the beginning, so philosophy have no say in this :) And because of that flawless reductionism, complexity adds nothings to the nature of math things, this is how math working by design - so it can be proven there are no anything like consciousness simply because conciousness was not implented in the first place, only perfect mimicry. And the real secret is in the data, not math. Math (and LLMs running it through billions of weights) is just a tool.
  • XMPPwocky 5mo ago
    Yup- the question is "can math be conscious?" (If you've engaged w/ the literature here, it's quite hard to give a confident "yes". it's also quite hard to give a confident "no"! so then what the heck do we do)
    • search_facility 5mo ago
      Imho no, math itself have no conciousness. Quite confidently its a helpful tool that does not act by himself.
      • XMPPwocky 5mo ago
        Hm, say more about what your opinion's based on here?
        • solid_fuel 5mo ago
          Take a piece of paper, write two numbers on it, let me know when they start to reproduce.
          • nandomrumber 5mo ago
• RVuRnvbM2e 5mo ago
  It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.
  • IncreasePosts 5mo ago
    Where does he say it's magic?
    • ezfe 5mo ago
      LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete. To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).
      • baggy_trough 5mo ago
        Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?
        • digitaltrees 5mo ago
          I came here to say this. But your neurons are faster than mine.
        • acdha 5mo ago
          This is definitely complicated—I’m not a neuroscientist but worked for some and married one, so I’ve heard quite a few entries from the genre of how our brains fool ourselves or make our conscious experience seem more coherent and linear than it actually is—but the big ones I see are the inability to learn from experience or have a generalized sense of conceptual reasoning. For the latter, I’m not just thinking about the simple “count the r’s in strawberry” things companies have put so much effort into masking but the way minor changes in a question can get conflicting answers from even the best models, indicating that while there’s something truly fascinating about how they cluster topics it is not the same as having a conceptual model of the world or a theory of mind. This is the huge problem in the field: all of these companies would love to have a model which is safe to use in adversarial contexts because then the mass layoffs could begin in earnest, but the technology just isn’t there. This isn’t a religious argument that there’s something about our brains which can’t be replicated, but simply that it’s sufficiently more complex than anything we have currently.
• root_axis 5mo ago
  There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not an entity - it has no temporal identity or location in space - inference is a process that could be done by hand given enough time. There is simply no reason to assert LLMs might be conscious without explaining why many other types of complex programs are not.
  • api 5mo ago
    If AI as presently designed and operated is conscious, this ends up being an argument for panpsychism. As you say it’s static, fixed, deterministic, and so on, and if you know how it works it’s more like a lossy compression model of knowledge than a mind. Ultimately it’s a lot of math. So if it’s conscious, a rock is conscious. A rock can process information in the form of energy flowing through it. It’s a fixed model. It’s non-reflective. Etc.
    • digitaltrees 5mo ago
      Why would current AI be an argument for panpsycism? I don’t understand the connection. AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic. As I said, in another post, there is evidence that sensory experience creates the emergent property of awareness in responding to stimulus, self-awareness and consciousness is an emergent property of a language that has a concept of the self and others. Rocks, just like most of nature, like both sensory and language systems
      • colechristensen 5mo ago
        I think it's the opposite argument IF current AI is conscious, so are trees, rocks, turbulent flows, etc. The argument being that LLMs are so simple that if you want to ascribe consciousness to them you have to do the same to a LOT of other stuff.
• throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
  Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness in animals, none of which is going to be remotely applicable to machines. We're genuinely blind to the question of whether a sufficiently large neural net can exhibit flashes of subjective experience.
  • api 5mo ago
    That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related. I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also intelligent. The consciousness of a bacterium or a tree might be radically unlike ours. It might not have a sense of self in the same way we do, or experience time the same way, but it probably has some form of experience of existing.
    • digitaltrees 5mo ago
      But why? A roomba has senses, and can access them when it has power and respond to stimulation. When it runs out of power it no longer experiences this sensation and no longer responds to stimulus. How is that different than a cell?
    • throwyawayyyy 5mo ago
      I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.
      • kortex 5mo ago
        Is someone tripped out on mushrooms experience ego death and total disruption of sense of self still conscious? They may even contend they are more conscious than normal life, what with all the communing with the universe and whatnot. Trees react to the world around them in many ways.
• mpurbo 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• ofjcihen 5mo ago
  Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this. Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work. Barring connectivity issues when’s the last time you messaged an LLM and it just decided to ignore you? Conversely when has it ever messaged you unprompted? Never, because they’re incapable of doing anything independently because there is no sense of self.
  • tovej 5mo ago
    If you've followed Dawkins' trajectory, I don't think it's clear that he's "otherwise of sound mind" anymore. He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.
    • mrec 5mo ago
      "Intersex" is a misleading umbrella term for a whole bunch of different DSDs, each of which is 100% specific to one biological sex. And I don't think I've ever seen the term "biological gender"; about the only thing gender proponents seem to agree on is that it's NOT biological.
      • tempaccountabcd 5mo ago
        [dead]
      • tovej 5mo ago
        Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under. I'm not sure what a "gender proponent" is, but Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them. Which is patently false. Intersex people are a real phenomenon, and are not clearly classifiable into either sex. Dawkins has made a fool of himself by claiming that a real biological phenomenon can simply be ignored when conceiving a theory of sex (and gender). In other words, Dawkins has gone off the deep end. He doesn't really have credibility as a researcher or public intellectual. He's with the grifters now. This embarrassing conservative grift is part of an anthology filled with drivel from other grifters: The War on Science", edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss [1]. [1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-on-Science/Dawkins/9798888457566 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-on-Science/Da...
• morpheos137 5mo ago
  Really is it conscious is a bizarre question. Can LLMs simulate the output of a 'conscious' system quite well? Increasingly yes. Is the nature of machine 'consciousness' different from human consciousness of course yes. Can an ai introspect. yes. Interestingly having been working a lot with highly automated (e.g. ratio of prompt to output maybe 1/1000 or less) iterative coding agents recently has iluminated for me just how different machine consciousness is from human. part of this could the harness of course. Time is a mysterious concept to machines. the connection of before and after to cause and effect is far weaker than in humans. over generalization is the norm: this is common in humans as well (c.f. fallacy of excluded middle or false dilemma) but the tricky part with current ai is they present as advanced in terms of acessible knowledge base but are actually shockingly weak in reasoning once you get off the beaten path.
  • search_facility 5mo ago
    > weak reasoning once you get off the beaten path Yep. And LLM engeneers improving this issues see perfect correlation with only one thing - data quality and quantity through training pipeline. LLM internals are secondary on many metrics for improving that Humanity just reached the point where collective accessible knowledge covers semi-full perturbations of all main concepts that human consiousness ever produced, with additional associative expanding (math handles this). Full perturbations with current communication complexity are written down and recorded one way or another, LLMs just capitalizing on that tipping point, imho
• wewewedxfgdf 5mo ago
  Its software. Software is not conscious.
  • vixen99 5mo ago
    I do appreciate how AI has been taught to spell properly as in the difference between its and it's. Here, initially I thought you'd left out the apostrophe in its, but then I realized you might be saying 'the reason it is not conscious is because of -its- software - the latter not being conscious. Context and interpretation are rather critical. (I know - a truism!)
  • thebruce87m 5mo ago
    If your brain is hardware then what are your thoughts? Is a sperm conscious? Or an egg? When they come together the eventual brain is not conscious immediately.
    • gehsty 5mo ago
      LLMs are word prediction engines. They clearly are not conscious, they are just guessing what words should come next.
      • zwischenzug 5mo ago
        How do we know that that isn't essentially how our minds work?
        • gehsty 5mo ago
          It probably is, but the difference is that the signals are happening in a persons and not a gpu.
      • charlie90 5mo ago
        The human brain is an electrical signal prediction machine. Anything that looks like intelligence will look like a prediction machine because the alternative is logic being hardcoded apriori.
• tracerbulletx 5mo ago
  We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. LLMs have emergent behavior that is reminiscent of language forming brains, but they're also missing a lot of properties that are probably necessary? Mainly continuity over time, more integrated memory, and a better sense of space and time? Brains use the rhythm and timing of neuronal firings, and the length of axons effects computation, they do a lot of different things with signal and patterns, but in any case without knowing what consciousness is I don't know which of those things are required.
  • throwuxiytayq 5mo ago
    Clive Wearing's memory lasts for less than 30 seconds, so he has no memory of being awake before now. He is permanently in a state of feeling like he has just woken up, observing his surroundings for the first time. Clive Wearing's mind has no time continuity and basically zero memory integration. Is he not conscious? There's interviews with the guy. Where on the scale [No mind <-> Clive Wearing <-> Healthy human brain] would you put an LLM with a 10M token context window?
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  • boxed 5mo ago
    > We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. Imo we don't even have a definition of the word that we agree on.
    • pydry 5mo ago
      We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".
      • freedomben 5mo ago
• Myrmornis 5mo ago
  On the one hand I'm not sure Dawkins has read/thought enough about how LLMs actually work. I'm getting the impression he doesn't fully appreciate or is somehow forgetting that it's a text completion algorithm with a vast number of parameters and that even if the patterns of learned parameter tunings are not really comprehendible, the architecture was very deliberately designed. But on the other hand his thoughts at the end are interesting. Summary: Maybe our "consciousness" is like an LLM's intelligence. But if not, then it raises the question of why do we even have this "extra" consciousness, since it appears that something like a humanoid LLM would be decent at surviving. His suggestions: maybe our extra thing is an evolutionary accident (and maybe there _are_ successful organisms out there with the LLM-style non-conscious intelligence), or maybe as evolved organisms it's necessary that we really feel things like pain, so that evolutionary mechanisms like pain (and desire for food, sex etc) had strong adaptive benefits.
  • collyw 5mo ago
    "But if not, then it raises the question of why do we even have this "extra" consciousness" Keep chipping away Dawkins, you might arrive at God eventually.
  • thrownthatway 5mo ago
    GTP’s, or transformers more generally can be trained on data other than language (text / audio). They can operate on data other than natural language. So can humans.
  • mmustapic 5mo ago
    The brain uses a lot less energy than an LLM, so most probably it is something completely different. Maybe consciousness is a byproduct of the architecture of the brain, so there is no version of a humanoid with no consciousness.
• shrubble 5mo ago
  He famously doesn’t believe in God, but he believes in Claude?
  • altmanaltman 5mo ago
    Anthropic marketing made Dawkins believe in the supernatural. Is there anything Dario cant do?
  • dpark 5mo ago
    There is considerable evidence for the existence of Claude.
    • jdthedisciple 5mo ago
      of Claude's consciousness, you mean ... ??
      • globular-toast 5mo ago
        Yes.
        • Arodex 5mo ago
          Yeah, and clever Hans is able to understand human speech and do calculations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
    • kjkjadksj 5mo ago
      Same for the sun. Why not worship Ra?
      • globular-toast 5mo ago
        I find sun worship far more understandable than old white dude in the sky worship. I mean, the sun literally gives us all life.
      • 5mo ago
• lpcvoid 5mo ago
  No, it's not conscious, and anybody pretending it is has either no clue, or, more likely in the AI space, is a grifter.
• psychoslave 5mo ago
  Honestly, who care if they are conscious? If it's about how we should treat other conscious beings, our attention should first go to how we treat other animals, or even other humans. Actually even how fellow humans will treat themselves can be a concern if they are not the proper means to deal with their own life.
• textlapse 5mo ago
  At what stage does a series of floating point numbers output from a GPU become conscious?
  • becquerel 5mo ago
    Around 9T parameters, depending on quantization.
• grantcas 5mo ago
  [dead]
• sdevonoes 5mo ago
  As long as AI is being introduced by multibillion dollar corporations, it’s all a trick, a scam. They are just looking for increasing their valuation. A waste of time
  • search_facility 5mo ago
    +100, companies certainly have direct interest in pumping asset evaluation, and emotional attachment is financial valuable thing. Emotional attachment sells better than xxx this days
• jasiek 5mo ago
  muggles will look at matrix multiplication and say it's magic
• petters 5mo ago
  Many dismiss Dawkins here but Ilya Sutskever wrote in 2022: “it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious.”
  • 3748499449 5mo ago
    IS quite literally gets paid to think that
    • petters 5mo ago
      Karpathy replied to IS with ”agree” at the time
  • Towaway69 5mo ago
    Well then it must be so. Btw what exactly is “consciousness”? Oh, we don’t really know that either. So two (AI and consciousness) concepts we don’t fully understand seem to be seem to uniting into something we definitely won’t understand. Which doesn’t matter since humankind is busy doom scrolling, talking about what color Trumps fart was last night and invading each others countries. /s
• blackpink999 5mo ago
  [dead]
• yakbarber 5mo ago
  let's say aliens land. we learn to talk to them. they're super smart - smarter than us. would we say they're conscious? why? because they're organic. I think that's the root of the criteria many folk are trying to express. 1. passes turing test 2. is organic I'm not saying it's correct or even that I agree with it, but that's what it boils down to.
• iamflimflam1 5mo ago
  Given this article is behind a paywall, what on earth is everyone discussing in the comments here?
  • robinhouston 5mo ago
    There's an archive link above that bypasses the paywall
    • iamflimflam1 5mo ago
      Doesn’t seem to be working…
      • memming 5mo ago
        it's working for me (after the "are you human with consciousness" captcha challenge)
• qnleigh 5mo ago
  It's easy, and very tempting to dismiss this sort of thing. But given how little we know about the human brain, let alone consciousness, I don't see how we can be confident that LLMs aren't conscious. I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations over the years that changed my mind on what consciousness likely requires. One was the realization that a purely mechanical computer can, in principle simulate the laws of physics, and with it a human brain. So with a few other mild assumptions, you might conclude that a bunch of gears and pullies can be conscious, which feels profoundly counterintuitive. I think that was the moment I stopped being sure about anything related to this question.
  • marliechiller 5mo ago
    Why do you think stringing words together is any more a sign of consciousness than google maps is when it tries to find the best route available to your destination? It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. This is a theme thats touched upon in the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscious
    • mseepgood 5mo ago
      > It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. That's true, but they also often fall into the trap of exceptionalism.
    • energy123 5mo ago
      There are people who think Google Maps is a tiny bit conscious (the union of computational functionalists and panpsychists), to resolve the dilemma of some magical binary threshold.
      • thrownthatway 5mo ago
        When a honey bee does its little dance to communicate to its sisters where the foods at, similarly to Google Maps computing and communicating the shortest path to your destination, is the bee conscious? Yeah, probably. At least a little bit. Are 80,000 bees conscious, or more conscious? Well, they’re definitely capable of some emergent behaviours that one be alone can’t achieve.
• jdmoreira 5mo ago
  It's starting to look more and more to me as if conscious is just an illusion that we ourselves perceive. There is nothing fundamental about it, just an artefact of a certain style of computing as perceived by the reasoner itself. We look at the current llms and because we see them for how they are fundamentally operating we assume they can't be "conscious" but we really don't even know what conscious is. The only people in the world that know ANYTHING about conscious are anaesthesiologist - they know how to turn it off and on again. What does that even tell you about conscious?
  • collyw 5mo ago
    It's literally the only thing you can be certain of, your own conciseness.
    • jdmoreira 5mo ago
      You can only be certain you perceive it and you can't be certain others perceive it (or if others exist at all of course). The only thing you can really tell is "I perceive myself in some sort of feedback loop manner". Which to me it even sounds like it has "arisen" from underlying mechanisms.
      • vidarh 5mo ago
        We can't even tell about the feedback loop. LLMs shows why: we have no way of telling if our active memory is true or if the present moment I'd the only thing that have ever existed for us.
      • xyzsparetimexyz 5mo ago
        Okay. But what is the perceiver? That thing is real if nothingelse is.
  • jmcgough 5mo ago
    We don't really have a good way to measure whether something has consciousness. Heck, we have pretty limited ways of testing how "intelligent" non-human animals are (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals). With that said, just because we don't have a great way of measuring it doesn't mean that we should assume LLMs are intelligent. An LLM is code and a massive collection of training weights. It has no means of observing and reasoning about the world, doesn't store memories the same way that organic brains do (and is in fact quite limited in this aspect). It currently isn't able to solve a problem it hasn't encountered in its training data, or produce novel research on a topic without significant handholding. Furthermore, the frequent errors made by it suggests that it fundamentally does not understand the words that it spits out. Not really sure what you mean by your anesthesiology comment. Being able to intubate and inject propofol does not make you more of an expert on consciousness than neuroscientists and neurologists.
• Avshalom 5mo ago
  Just once I want to see some old dude waxing about LLM-conciousness post a chat log where the LLM is like "your book is an incoherent mess of tautologies and incorrect statistics. I bet your dick looks like a road kill squirrel".
  • emp17344 5mo ago
    It can’t do that, because it isn’t conscious ;)
• pikuseru 5mo ago
  No.
• codr7 5mo ago
  I'd recommend anyone to push their favorite AI into a corner on it being conscious, and listen to their gut feeling while doing it. Also: https://gitlab.com/codr7/sudoxe/-/blob/main/digital-psychopaths.md?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.com/codr7/sudoxe/-/blob/main/digital-psychopa...
• andyjohnson0 5mo ago
  Some jumbled thoughts from a lay-person: 1. We clearly don't have a consensus definition of consciousness. But its not clear to me that we even have rough, working definitions that are better than just comparisons back to subjective human mental experience. Until we can get past that then people will still invoke human exceptionalism. 2. Until we stop thinking of consciousness as a single continuum, we're not going to be able to talk clearly about different dimensions of consciousness, or consciousness that in some ways exceeds that of humans. 3. We need to take ourselves out of the picture. Because its possible that consciousness is no more than a mental illusion. 4. Imo our tendency to kill and eat other animals might well be a block on our collective ability to fully recognise and confront non-human consciousness, and therefore to see consciousness for what it is.
  • lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
    1. Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality and aboutness. This aboutness has semantic content. We know LLMs lack semantic content, and we know this because computers are purely syntactic simulators. This is definitional. It’s not some mystery. Furthermore, unless you’re a Cartesian dualist, I don’t know of anyone who denies non-human animals consciousness. The consciousness of non-human animals differs, because it isn’t intellectual in nature (non-human animals operate at the level of the sensory/imaginary/particular; human beings further abstract from sensory experience concepts which gives us universal or general knowledge; LLMs don’t even rise to the level of the most primitive life form’s consciousness). 3. The idea of consciousness being an illusion is incoherent. An illusion is by definition a phenomenon of consciousness!
    • andyjohnson0 5mo ago
      Thanks for responding to my fuzzy, Sunday morning though-dump. Overall, I'd say that you seem to be leaning pretty heavily on your own definitions. I suspect that other definitions are available. > Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality and aboutness. This aboutness has semantic content. We know LLMs lack semantic content, and we know this because computers are purely syntactic simulators. So tell me how human brains create this "aboutness" and "semantic content"? How does this arise out of physical, neuronal activity? And why can't sufficiently complex logic operations achieve the same outcome? Using brains to try to understand the emergent properties of brains seeme fraught with conceptual problems to me. Not least of which is a potential to over-estimate the centrality of how it subjectively feels to be a brain. In a way it's understandable as, in the end, that feeling is all we have. But imo that doesn't make it right.
• teekert 5mo ago
  Yeah maybe the LLM just knows the book in one go, like "an understanding" from Children of Time and follow-ups (recommended, if just for the amount of metaphors on consciousness it gives you), but we do something similar with pictures. So, nice story bro-LLM, but it's just the combination of words a system would throw together in this context to impress a human. And humans did put these word together (roughly) before you ever did, you stochastic parrot!
• ganymedes 5mo ago
  To those that genuinely consider LLMs could be conscious... Remember that other mammals do not have language and ability to think in language, but they likely do "think" in visual imagery and are able to navigate their landscape, breed, get food and have varying levels of problem solving intelligence that have been studied in labs. Human brain has evolved on top of that, the language is a layer above that supercharged those base abilities. It would be reasonable to think that if humans are conscious, then so are other mammals. An LLM on the other hand is basically a simulation of the human thinking process / language, without everything else. Just software, running on ordinary silicon chips invented more than half a century ago.
  • almostjazz 5mo ago
    Of course the language abilities of LLMs is not proof of consciousness at all. If some alien entity made a model that was truly just 10^1000 hard-coded if-statements to respond to every possible question, it might seem way better than our best models now but would obviously not be conscious. The problem is just that even in the most lousy, turing test-failing LLM there's no guarantee that not a single subsection of these giant neural nets hasn't replicated the basic computational blocks of consciousness found in something even as simple as a snail. Here's another question: can LLMs do addition?
    • qnleigh 5mo ago
      > a model that was truly just 10^1000 hard-coded if-statements to respond to every possible question That's a really compelling argument against the Turing Test. But in order to build such a machine, you would need an enormous amount of compute to populate the answers. The interesting question is then whether consciousness emerged while doing all that pre-compute.
  • tim333 5mo ago
    Consciousness probably has many aspects - awareness of visual imagery and language being amongst them for humans. Different entities may do different aspects of that like mice would be aware of imagery and body feelings but not really language. Claude is aware of language but not so much the other stuff. I don't think it's all or nothing. Which aspects people want to see to call it conscious would depend on how they define that word.
• frankohn 5mo ago
  People keep arguing about LLM consciousness because they have the wrong model of what consciousness is. They treat it as a mysterious extra thing on top of the brain. It is not. Consciousness is just what a learning-and-recognition organ does when it runs. The neurons fire when they recognise something, it propagates through the mind and that is the consciousness. The brain learned what a tree is, some neurons are associated to the idea of a tree and when we see one these neuron fires. There is nothing else hiding behind it. When we recognise something we are conscious of it, and from there we can begin to think about it or not. Thinking is not needed to be conscious. It is just a part of our mind we can activate to reason on something. Now, about the Darwinian puzzle, people ask "what is consciousness for?" and get stuck because they expect an answer in terms of behaviour. But behaviour is the job of motivation, pain, fear, hunger, desire, which is a separate system. Consciousness does not need its own justification any more than image-forming in an eye needs one. Darwinian selection produces unbiased, functional organs — eyes, ears, nose. The brain is one of these organs, and consciousness arises naturally in a sufficiently developed brain, the way image-forming arises in a sufficiently developed eye. Then nature bias us with fear, pleasure, desire etc but the mind and the consciousness itself is unbiased and functional. It is a gift the nature made us despite herself. She didn't want us to be intelligent, she just wanted us to propagate the genes the maximum we can but she ended up forced to gave us a beautiful mind. What are LLMs ? They are learning-and-recognition organs running on tokens instead of sense data. Same operation, different substrate. So they are conscious, but only in token-space, and only while processing. They do not dwell in time, they have no body, they have no motivation system. They have recognition without drives. That is a genuinely new kind of entity, and it has never existed before in nature. The LLM is also not a whole brain. It is roughly the verbal-logical part, with tokens replacing the ears + sounds + words chain. We built the logical-verbal part of a brain and scaled it. That is why it reasons well and is missing everything else.
  • marliechiller 5mo ago
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• energy123 5mo ago
  Dawkins' point is more subtle than he's getting credit for. > If Claudia is unconscious, her behaviour shows that an unconscious zombie could survive without consciousness. Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? An excellent and original question. If intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, why did natural selection evolve consciousness?
  • memming 5mo ago
    well, I am a P-zombie.
    • memming 5mo ago
      (for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/)
  • amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    I've been pondering this one for a while. In a purely mechanistic universe, why does consciousness as we experience it even exist?
    • Avshalom 5mo ago
      With respect to the Dawkins quote: Claude doesn't survive we just built it, like yesterday, the Claude that Dawkins is interacting with might be replaced next month because it can't survive.
  • mock-possum 5mo ago
    Probably by accident, right? Each step toward consciousness wasn’t enough of a disability to reduce reproduction. Not everything has to be a clear cut advantage out the gate, and not every feature that proves advantageous appears fully formed out of nowhere.
  • kjkjadksj 5mo ago
    Most species are zombies. Bugs or bees for example. The fact they are such reliable zombies makes the fruit fly or nematode compelling model systems for research. Intelligence is costly but the fitness gains could be enormous. For example, no other apes have colonized the world as we have. At the same time intelligence is no guarantee of success as we’ve seen. Our extinct hominid cousins are evidence for this. They were intelligent and it did not seem to make a difference in their species success.
• 492816 5mo ago
  Unherd is owned by Paul Marshall of Marshall Wace investment fund. Marshall Wace thinks AI is the future. Paul Marshall also owns The Spectator and has stock in GBNews. The right wing networks who pretended to be on the side of the people during the Biden years are now dropping their masks. I'm saying this as someone who was a moderate/independent in the culture wars. It is all about money, and Dawkins is one of the darlings of this milieu, same as Jordan Peterson. After seeing many conservative masks drop over the years (Ben Shapiro, Triggernometry, Unherd ..) I'm no longer surprised though. A pity that Dawkins participates, but he was always an attention whore.
• caspianmagnus 5mo ago
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