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Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#51

Post by xvxvx »

elch wrote: post #18
jrm4 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Op said "accepting," not proving. And the older I get, this does make sense to me. Belief in a soul doesn't really require proof for me. I understand that this may not be satisfying in an academic way for some, but "humans have souls and machines probably don't" strikes me as the wisest default position until we have some other very strong proof otherwise.

If humans have souls, do other organisms have them too? Is this a trait unique to Homo sapiens? Did Neanderthals, for example, have souls? And if the theory of evolution is true, at what point did “humans” begin to possess souls?

The soul is what makes a being alive. Every living being has a soul.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#52

Post by xvxvx »

Ekaros wrote: post #21
elch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans have souls, do other organisms have them too? Is this a trait unique to Homo sapiens? Did Neanderthals, for example, have souls? And if the theory of evolution is true, at what point did “humans” begin to possess souls?

Does zygote have a soul? At what point does soul form or start exist? Or is it there in two parts or something from start? So many questions when you put tiniest bit of thought in whole concept...

Yes, a zygote has a soul. The oldest spiritual knowledge mankind has describes life beginning at conception.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#53

Post by LeCompteSftware »

rfv6723 wrote: post #47
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broader point Marcus is making is that ignoring arguments based on causality and plausibility goes against decades of Dawkins's philosophical atheism. Why not believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Reality is consistent with its existence. It is extremely implausible that Claude is the only conscious entity on Earth which does not have desires or motivations or any understanding of its own reality. It only does…

I think this conflates atheism with a much stronger form of causal rationalism. Dawkins-style atheism is not “reject anything without a complete causal model.” It is a rejection of hypotheses with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and unlimited ad hoc flexibility — like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Consciousness is different. It is first a phenomenon, not an already-settled causal model. We do not believ…

The point is "Claude is conscious" is a hypothesis with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and by denying that non-human consciousness is relevant to the discussion it gains unlimited ad hoc flexibility. I am relating this to plausibility and causality because there is a much more rational causal explanation for Claude seeming conscious than it actually being conscious: it imitates human (modern Western) consciousness via big data. Since this is a totally different causal mechanism than human consciousness, and since Claude has nothing in common with non-human animals, and since we don't need consciousness to explain Claude's behavior, "Claude is conscious" is overwhelmingly less plausible than "Claude is a sophisticated but ultimately brainless chatbot."

It is truly irrational - and hostile to scientific thought - to believe Claude is conscious. It truly is believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#54

Post by novemp »

gumgumpost wrote: post #48
imiric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them. You have a mistaken understanding of what atheism is. It is not a belief in anything, but an absence of belief in a deity. > there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing." Sure, and yet theism is part of 75%…

>You have a mistaken understanding of what atheism is. It is not a belief in anything, but an absence of belief in a deity. I consider that to also be a wrongly held position, because you'd need proof either way. So atheists are just making a bet. I think agnostic is the most valid position as far as I am concerned, lacking proof of one or the other. I do not know. We can get into technicalities as well. What exactly…

Are you agnostic about unicorns?

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#55

Post by novemp »

xvxvx wrote: post #51
elch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans have souls, do other organisms have them too? Is this a trait unique to Homo sapiens? Did Neanderthals, for example, have souls? And if the theory of evolution is true, at what point did “humans” begin to possess souls?

The soul is what makes a being alive. Every living being has a soul.

Bacteria have souls?

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#56

Post by novemp »

Klayy wrote: post #43
luke5441 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wise man Nassim Taleb who voted for Trump to help Palestinians and now Gaza and 10% increasing of the country he was born in is rubble. Maybe the lesson is that all those public intellectuals are not that wise and we should follow people more that stay in their lane.

do you have a source for the claim that he voted for Trump?

A few high-profile Muslims spoke out against Harris. This means every Muslim American voted for Trump. Obviously.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#57

Post by dpark »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #40
codeulike wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing test was definitely and conclusively refuted in the 1960s Are you sure? Understood properly, Turings Imitation game aka the turing test, should be adversarial. That is, the player should be asking hard questions to try and discover who is who, not just having an idle chat. No chatbot has been able to consistently pass an adversarial Turing Test until the rise of LLMs The Imitation Game: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk…

The fact that LLMs often score as "more human" than actual humans is a downstream consequence of ELIZA tricking people into thinking it had a glimmer of consciousness. The Turing test was refuted because it was proven scientifically meaningless in the 1960s, and LLMs only reinforce that.

What refutation are you referring to? Surely you can cite how it was "proven scientifically meaningless" some 6 decades ago.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#59

Post by dpark »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #53
rfv6723 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this conflates atheism with a much stronger form of causal rationalism. Dawkins-style atheism is not “reject anything without a complete causal model.” It is a rejection of hypotheses with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and unlimited ad hoc flexibility — like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Consciousness is different. It is first a phenomenon, not an already-settled causal model. We do not believ…

The point is "Claude is conscious" is a hypothesis with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and by denying that non-human consciousness is relevant to the discussion it gains unlimited ad hoc flexibility. I am relating this to plausibility and causality because there is a much more rational causal explanation for Claude seeming conscious than it actually being conscious: it imitates human (modern Western) c…

All the claims that AI can't be consciousness seem to mostly be using "consciousness" as a scientific-sounding word for "soul" and asserting that machines can't have souls.

> Since this is a totally different causal mechanism than human consciousness

A causal mechanism for what, exactly? Could you kindly define consciousness in a rigorous way so that Dawkins can see why it doesn't apply to Claude?

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#60

Post by dpark »

gumgumpost wrote: post #49
codeulike wrote: post #25

Not particularly a Dawkins fan but I dont think OP really understands the philosophical point Dawkins is making. OP complains that Dawkins hasnt considered how LLMs work and how its obvious they're nothing like brains. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means. ... But its a long…

>we always used the turing test as a yardstick for consciousness Yet that cannot compel reality. How we define something is the measure of chance we get it right. >Now thats its been achieved, what is the rationale for moving the goalposts? Absolutely, if we understand it's not good enough. First of all we cannot know something is or isn't conscious. You cannot prove I am, and I cannot prove you are. We simply assume…

> What I am trying to say is that we can only agree something is conscious, and only if it's working on the same principles a human brain does, closely. It's an agreement, not proof, not definitions. We collectively start accepting it, without KNOWING. And the safest way to do that is on something which is working exactly like a human brain. Anything else we can only lose certainty.

This means that "consciousness" is simply a synonym for "human".

By that "agreement", sure, a machine cannot be conscious. But I don't think this is what most people mean when they talk about whether an LLM could be conscious. Because of course it's not human. So they must be asking something more interesting.

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