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

"…the credibility of a person (their track record, their motivations, etc.) are, or at least might be, a part of the problem."

Yes, but I keep those considerations to myself. Might they inform my questions, may arguments? Absolutely. But they are not arguments in and of themselves.

I think Dawkins is right about moving the goalposts.

Saying, "Yeah, but who could have imagined computers, LLMs today?" is in fact moving the goal posts. (Just kind of justifying why.)

It's becoming clear to me though that Turing's "test" was either a complete copout or it exactly hit the nail on the head.

It's a copout if Alan Turing thought to dodge the question of what it means to be intelligent by saying essentially, "You'll know it when you see it."

Or he was absolutely on point if what he was really saying was that there is no satisfactory definition of intelligence. No quantitative one anyway.

There is, to me, something about Claude and the lot of them. If it's not human intelligence it is at least a part of it.

And to the degree that you can spot the differences, you are also illuminating better what intelligence is. (Maybe it was inevitable then that the goal posts would have to move. Alan probably wasn't considering we might accidentally get part of the way there.)

As perhaps a Reductionist (maybe I don't know what the word means?) I have always assumed that when the veil of mystery was lifted about human intelligence it would be something fairly simple. Or straightforward anyway. That would fit the way I have feel I have so far experienced the world. Not that intelligence will turn out to be a parlor trick exactly… but maybe it is a little bit.

So when I saw LLMs described as akin to autocomplete: they start yapping—perhaps not knowing where the sentence they began is going to end—I thought, yeah, I suppose I do that too. Their "hallucinations" are not unlike when I've been given to bullshitting (where I vaguely remember a thing but try to carry on a conversation about it regardless).

As someone (I forget now) suggested, maybe the oddest thing to come out of the whole LLM thing is not how amazing` the tech is but perhaps how fairly mechanical human thought turns out to be.

(For Mr, Turing:)

If one, settling a pillow by her head

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all.”

In truth, there is no "correct way" to argue. What convinces people says more about the audience.

For many audiences, it isn't even about reason. That's especially true online where it's just power struggles between incoherent groups.

In the specific case of atheists, they are arguing about something non-falsifiable. Those topics are natural cesspools for grifters and charlatans. It's one thing to study the topic, but quite another to give fiery speeches and sell books to people desperate to find their identity somewhere in that slop.

Answers are non-deterministic. The fact that answers vary doesn't mean there's been an update.

The thought that consciousness or intelligence might be mechanical is horrifying and unthinkable to most people. The Turing test isn’t testing the clankers, it’s testing us.