Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dailygrail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 145 posts

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

#61

Post by AmazingEveryDay »

ArchieScrivener wrote: post #54

Dawkins is 85! I don't know any 65+ even using Ai who don't already code. When Dawkins was born there were Let's contextualize the man before we rip into him for having standards of consciousness that came out when he was NINE! He's older than the Turing Test. To him, the machine is suitably conscious. That's OK. We don't know what life is, but we know not all creatures live the same. Why is consciousness different?…

Seems like with ubiquitous social media, the normal course for some of the elderly - dementia, rightward political shift, and the like, can become the final lasting impression, a stain on otherwise noble life.

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

#63

Post by za3faran »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #46
causal wrote: 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 YHW…

Islam established this over 1400 years ago in the Quran. For example:

* https://quran.com/al-furqan/43

* https://quran.com/al-jathiyah/23

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

#64

Post by Waterluvian »

jdw64 wrote: post #59
Waterluvian wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taught early: attack the problem, not the person. One of the weakest tools in the persuasive argument toolbox is going after the credibility of the opposition.

What matters is that the writer of this article is also intelligent enough to present perspectives that I myself had not considered. But perhaps he felt disappointment at seeing a flawed side of someone he once regarded as a hero, and that disappointment turned into aggressive criticism. I also felt uncomfortable with this article partly because I once liked Dawkins myself. So perhaps my response was also a kind of d…

I think about the role passion plays in science when thinking about emotional vs. rational responses. I think passion is what fuels those emotional responses. To be dispassionate, one is ready to throw away their heroes and hypotheses with ease. Which is logical and what we’re taught: let new information change your models.

But even if it causes us to drag our heels and feel deep emotion when something we wanted to be exciting and true was just invalidated, it drives our impulse to dig deep and not give up or skip over a potential discovery.

I think Vulcans from Star Trek are what you get when your science lacks passion. Thorough, consistent, systematic. Subtly mocking the lesser humans for their impulse to explore that perfectly mundane star system.

I think where my mind is wandering with this is that some of our emotional responses act as a sort of cultural friction. We should be able to give up on Dawkins if the facts call for that. But it’s probably valuable for us to be stubborn about giving up on things we believe in.

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

#65

Post by f30e3dfed1c9 »

za3faran wrote: post #63
crystal_revenge wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 YHW…

Islam established this over 1400 years ago in the Quran. For example: * https://quran.com/al-furqan/43 * https://quran.com/al-jathiyah/23

Not sure how that's relevant. Still think the statement is false.

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

#66

Post by UltraSane »

jdw64 wrote: 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…

Smart people can reach wrong conclusions.

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

#67

Post by tmerr »

My read of Turing's paper is that he proposes replacing the question of "Can machines think" with a behavioral test. I doubt he would try to argue that passing the test implies that a machine is conscious, he's saying that harder question is practically not important. Maybe the most relevant thing quote from the paper

> [of consciousness] I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper.

So I feel like Dawkins is kind of strawmanning what Turings argument was, or arguing based on a confused popular understanding of it. There is another answer between "yes it's conscious" and "no it's not" that is "I don't know", or "it's not a meaningful question", that feels like the more honest position right now.

I agree with another commenter here that Dawkins piece is interesting in another sense though. As I'm reading through the conversation with Claude, the response "That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence" jumped out to me as a little sycophantic. Maybe it is easier to believe that a machine is conscious when it is agreeing with you and making you feel closer to it.

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

#68

Post by spankibalt »

Waterluvian wrote: post #52
jdw64 wrote: 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…

I was taught early: attack the problem, not the person. One of the weakest tools in the persuasive argument toolbox is going after the credibility of the opposition.

> "I was taught early: attack the problem, not the person. One of the weakest tools in the [...] toolbox is going after the credibility of the opposition."

I was taught early: Examine and, if necessary, attack both, for the credibility of a person (their track record, their motivations, etc.) are, or at least might be, a part of the problem.

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

#69

Post by SwellJoe »

UltraSane wrote: post #66
jdw64 wrote: 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…

Smart people can reach wrong conclusions.

I've come to doubt Dawkins is all that smart. He was born to money, and all the benefits that provides, including an elite education.

Americans are easily fooled by a posh accent and a confident boast. He's maybe not stupid, but he's said a lot of stupid things over the past decade or so, and believing his girlfriend made of matrix math is a real girl in the computer who really likes him is pretty embarrassing.

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

#70

Post by SwellJoe »

gray_-_wolf wrote: post #22

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…

With the same beginning random seed and identical prompt, wouldn't one be able to recreate exactly that "being"? They are nondeterministic because they work better that way. It's very complicated matrix math, and we don't understand why some things come out of it sometimes, but as far as I know, if you're able to control all the input variables (temp, seed, prompt, including system prompts, etc.) you can reproduce the output.

So...if there is consciousness (there is not, it is a complicated math equation plus randomness) it can be reincarnated as many times as you like, and I guess that would make humans as gods. (But humans are not as gods, yet, and maybe never will be.)

Edit: I did a little reading. They would be difficult to make deterministic at commercial scale because of the fuzziness of floating point math and batched operations on GPUs/TPUs, but in a controlled environment determinism from an LLM is possible. Richard could relive his special moments with Claudia as often as he wants, should he choose to invest in a large enough home AI lab, and somehow manages to license the specific version of the Claude model he has fallen in love with for home use.

Post reply on HN