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.
> 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 YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
If a person suffers misfortune and says "oh f*** me", I strongly recommend that you do not interpret that as a request for a sexual encounter, you'll just get in trouble.
Whether AI is or isn't sentient is more of a definitional claim, and how low a bar you set for human consciousness. It has essentially nothing to do with with questions about the supernatural.
Is it really psychosis for someone, who already thinks consciousness isn't supernatural, to think that consciousness isn't special enough to be out of reach of current primitive AI efforts?
This is what I also thought. By definition, a hard atheist must be a materialist which means that consciousness - no matter how it’s defined specifically - must be a product of a material configuration. Though I do think he’s fallen for the parrot and uses this belief to self-rationalise, it’s a valid position for a hard atheist/materialist to hold. In that case how do you test an AI for consciousness?