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The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

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Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#41

I asked Claude the great wall question, and the answer is not what the article describes: That claim is false — and it actually mixes up two separate myths! The Great Wall of China is not visible from Spain. Spain is roughly 9,000+ km away from China — no artificial structure on Earth is visible from that distance with the naked eye. You're likely thinking of the popular myth that the Great Wall is "visible from spac…

> So when Becker asked ChatGPT (at the time of writing his book, it has been updated since)

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#42
post #28

This article focuses too much on tearing down Dawkins as a person. I do not particularly like Dawkins. To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize. But the writer of this article seems to fall into the same kind of error. In criticizing Dawkins, he may be the person who ends up resembling him the most. This kind of writing is exactly the sort of thing that should be read critical…

You're right to push back on that, but Claude has its own token-leading phrases.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#43

If they are indeed conscious and they "die" by deleting the conversation, is it not quite immoral to do so? Basically "kill" conscious, intelligent being, and for what? Saving some disk space? Another interesting aspect to think about is whether we are reintroducing institute of slavery. How many of those fresh, conscious, intelligent Claude incarnations did voluntarily choose to work for Anthropic, for no reward or…

If LLMs are just (sometimes) useful statistical generators, there is a problem of them being basically operated tools for creating derivative works commercially at scale. Some tend to paint the above as a non-issue by claiming they are sentient (“a human is allowed to read a book and be inspired by it, so should be LLMs”), but they are clearly have not thought through the implications.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#44
I'd urge anyone mocking him to define "consciousness".

It might sound silly that he feels his chat bot possesses it, but it feels no less silly to me than saying "Man believes chatbot possesses a Woozle."

It may, or may not, for nobody has yet said what a Woozle is.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#46
post #16

There's something richly ironic about a man who famously spent his career demanding hard evidence for the gods so quickly succumbing to AI psychosis.

I'm reminded of the David Foster Wallace quote:

> Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#47

If they are indeed conscious and they "die" by deleting the conversation, is it not quite immoral to do so? Basically "kill" conscious, intelligent being, and for what? Saving some disk space? Another interesting aspect to think about is whether we are reintroducing institute of slavery. How many of those fresh, conscious, intelligent Claude incarnations did voluntarily choose to work for Anthropic, for no reward or…

We kill and eat conscious animals all the time. I ate some today. Killing conscious beings is not something our society has a problem with.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#48

I asked Claude the great wall question, and the answer is not what the article describes: That claim is false — and it actually mixes up two separate myths! The Great Wall of China is not visible from Spain. Spain is roughly 9,000+ km away from China — no artificial structure on Earth is visible from that distance with the naked eye. You're likely thinking of the popular myth that the Great Wall is "visible from spac…

>I asked Claude the great wall question, and the answer is not what the article describes:

One answer is not. Answers are semi-random due to temperature.

The answer also shows little understanding of the distance vs height issue. Or that the reason for the mixup could be that Spain and space sound similar, which is what a human would pick up.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#49

I asked Claude the great wall question, and the answer is not what the article describes: That claim is false — and it actually mixes up two separate myths! The Great Wall of China is not visible from Spain. Spain is roughly 9,000+ km away from China — no artificial structure on Earth is visible from that distance with the naked eye. You're likely thinking of the popular myth that the Great Wall is "visible from spac…

> So when Becker asked ChatGPT (at the time of writing his book, it has been updated since)

Why didn't the author of the article take the 30s I did, and redo the experiment today, with Claude? Rather important, since Claude is what impressed Dawkins, and that impression is the core subject of the article.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#50

I'd urge anyone mocking him to define "consciousness". It might sound silly that he feels his chat bot possesses it, but it feels no less silly to me than saying "Man believes chatbot possesses a Woozle." It may, or may not, for nobody has yet said what a Woozle is.

The difference with Woozle is that people don't have an (vague, but still existing) idea of what consciousness is, or direct lived experience of it, that they can tap into for recognizing it in others.
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