Comment by jdw64
2 days ago
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 critically. I do not consider myself especially intelligent, but given the context shown in this article, I find myself looking at Dawkins with more pity than contempt.
Before we even define what consciousness is, I think Dawkins was probably lonely in his old age. He may have wanted, and found, someone to talk to. AI entered into that loneliness. Regardless of whether AI is conscious, we should examine why he came to believe it might be.
This is something Anthropic has intentionally tuned. Claude has a very refined conversational pattern. Unlike a more clumsy model like Gemini, which sometimes throws out token-leading phrases such as “further exploration,” Claude is RLHF-trained in a way that feels genuinely human. The name Anthropic almost feels appropriate here.
After reading this article, what frightens me is not Dawkins. What frightens me is Anthropic, the company that tuned Claude. I am afraid of that friendliness.
Dawkins is intelligent. But he does not know AI. Every master of a field carries their own hammer, their own discipline, and projects it onto the world. The essence of an LLM is an echo of what I have said. It receives input, refers to the words and memory connected to that input, and wanders through a certain semantic space.
Within that phenomenon, Claude happened to satisfy the conditions for “consciousness” inside Dawkins’s own cognitive model. So even if Dawkins regarded Claude as conscious, I do not find that especially strange.
What is more frightening is Anthropic’s ability to make a machine feel personified.
In truth, even I sometimes talk to Claude when I feel lonely, despite knowing that Claude is not conscious. In that sense, I understand Dawkins.
> To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize.
I consider myself agnostic. And I'll provide my definition of what that means to me, since there's several in existence. I take as an axiom that the truth-value of the statement, "Is there a God," is unknowable / unverifiable to humans. I then define faith as the choice to (not) believe despite not knowing its truth-value. Contrasting with knowledge as having some basis for knowing the truth-value.
I like these definitions, because they allow for agnostic theism and agnostic atheism. But, here's the catch and where the tie to your statement comes. In this world view, atheism is just as much a faith-based position as theism is. Why? Because it's the choice to not believe, despite not having knowledge.
I define myself as an atheist, though by your definition I may be closer to an agnostic.
My position is closer to “whether God exists or not, it does not matter much to me.” I sometimes think free will exists, and I sometimes imagine that perhaps someone created all of this, though I do accept evolution. In that sense, I think my view is close to yours.
Personally, I also think religion has real benefits. Many local social service organizations are rooted in religious communities, and socially isolated people often rely on religion. In some cases, religion may be the last community that helps people preserve their humanity.
I also think atheism has benefits. Many atheists tend to believe strongly in free will, and that can make them think more carefully about responsibility for their own choices.
In any case, this is the kind of question where it is difficult to produce a final answer. But one thing does seem certain: the probability that we can talk to each other like this, even through the internet, is miraculously low.
And I am genuinely glad that I could exchange comments with someone like you, someone intelligent enough to label things so precisely.
Have a good day.
As an over-educated person who still struggles to think for himself through everything from scratch, the above nevertheless sounds like Descartes'
dubito, ergo sum
From this, I can go in practical (ie, separable from free will & other ontological considerations) directions, like:
insofar as organised religion does not equate existence with faith, maybe its most important use is to overcome the fear of death.
That's cool enough for me, but maybe there are other less "brainwashy", "respectful to the free will[0]" ways to overcome fear of meaninglessness/death/lack of validation from the world, plus all the anguish that these preceding emotional distractions entail?
[0] we do not have to admit the existence of free will in order to respect it? Thus can we substitute God with Free Will everywhere but retain the practical benefits of respecting free will without the ontological difficulties with the precise nature of God?
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Consciousness and God both seem to have this property in common: they're real but not what we think they are.
Only when we have a decent theory of consciousness will we know what counts as evidence for whether a particular entity is conscious or not.
You can't disprove the space teapot, therefore you're religious for not believe in it.
You're right to push back on that, but Claude has its own token-leading phrases.
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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.
"…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.
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Then you were taught to argue incorrectly.
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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 defense born from fandom.
That is not a purely rational response. It is an emotional one.
In the end, not everything in the world can be reduced to understanding.
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.
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.
> He was born to money
I'm guessing you wouldn't like to judge someone because they were poor.
Letting issues about money overly influence your opinions is a signal that _you_ care too much about money.
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