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To be fair, the evidence that LLM aren't conscious is entirely "because of the feels" evidence. 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.
The lack of reading comprehension (or perhaps just lack of reading) behind this brouhaha is amazing. 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 peopl…
> 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.
These sorts of articles have no value. The author is a "media entrepreneur". Being forced to read his opinion intermixed with out of context pull-quotes is not a good use of anyone's time. If Dawkins gave his opinion at length it might be worth reading but only if your goal is to understand something about Dawkins not about AI. I would be interested to see a scientific discussion on what consciousness is biologically…
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).
The lack of reading comprehension (or perhaps just lack of reading) behind this brouhaha is amazing. 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 peopl…
These sorts of articles have no value. The author is a "media entrepreneur". Being forced to read his opinion intermixed with out of context pull-quotes is not a good use of anyone's time. If Dawkins gave his opinion at length it might be worth reading but only if your goal is to understand something about Dawkins not about AI. I would be interested to see a scientific discussion on what consciousness is biologically…
Everyone just wants to attack whoever is in the spotlight at the moment, no matter who it is or what they are saying
The lack of reading comprehension (or perhaps just lack of reading) behind this brouhaha is amazing. 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 peopl…
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.
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).
"The selfish gene" is one of the most influential books I read. I wish Dawkins would have stuck with biology instead of becoming this insufferable edgelord of the dark enlitenment. He's a great science educator, but failed human.
What he has done in the past decade or so, on the other hand, is deeply disappointing.
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)