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.

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Hnrobert42 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're right to push back on that, but Claude has its own token-leading phrases.

	▲	jdw64 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
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Waterluvian 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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spankibalt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> "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.

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JKCalhoun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"…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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potsandpans 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Then you were taught to argue incorrectly.

	▲	sublinear an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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jdw64 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	Waterluvian 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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UltraSane 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Smart people can reach wrong conclusions.

	▲	SwellJoe 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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rspeele 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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