When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
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Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#2Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#3Related: 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
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#4Related: 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
Also The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991340 - May 2026 (30 comments)
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#5Related: 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
So we know Claude is deterministic, but does that mean it is not conscious?
Or what is the reasoning exactly?
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#6Since 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.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#7It 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.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#8Since 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 flawles…
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)
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#9It 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.
Where does he say it's magic?
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#10Related: 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
So we know Claude is deterministic, but does that mean it is not conscious? Or what is the reasoning exactly?
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.