Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion
flux.community
flux.community
I would be interested to see a scientific discussion on what consciousness is biologically and if AI can fit that definition. But it would require someone with more credentials than a _media entrepreneur_ to pull off.
I personally think its moot to discuss whether LLMs are conscious. If they are, then we have diluted the definition to something that has no relevance to morality or concepts like life and death. Lets just take them for what they are, if we feel like they deserve to be treated with respect then we should (dont think anyone does yet).
And overhauling the language to match scientific understanding requires getting everyone onboard with that scientific understanding. Good luck with that, given that we have plenty of people who believe in weirdest nonsense.
Brain is not the only thing that makes us conscious, the whole human is a super-weird collection of highly intertwined systems that work together and produce whatever we call “human.” As I get it, it’s a huge complexity all the way down to that gut bacteria that somehow affects our thinking too. And I don’t think we have a vocabulary for all that - we mostly think of “self” as a single entity.
I'm not quite sure how you'd apply that to consciousness vs thinking say.
Everyone just wants to attack whoever is in the spotlight at the moment, no matter who it is or what they are saying
The article links to its source, but I'm not clicking on the archive.is link. It could well be to somebody else's blog.
The primary source is Dawkins' own article on Unherd.
https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius/
That's actual news. Everything else is commentary.
I'm fairly convinced that at least half the criticism Dawkins has received is more a result of him being (perhaps overly) stubborn about semantics than any actual antipathy, bigotry or hatred.
He wants language to match what has been solidly established & entrenched in academia. It's just that for better or worse, the general public is largely uninterested in or actively opposed to that very language. Eventually, enough of those people will get involved enough in academia to bring more nuance to the language. Meanwhile, academics are going to be academic and cite authoritative books and stuff and nitpick over tiny details. That's what they do. This shouldn't be surprising.
As a former philosophy student, the ethical concerns of generative AI and modern LLMs were immediately obvious to me. If your average human can interact with an agent over a long conversation and not have the slightest clue it's not another conscious human, we have a problem. That problem is here now-- for a couple years at this point. And it's getting worse.
The issue is not whether or not the agent is conscious. Philosophy says we can't know (granted, it also says the same about us). The much more serious problem is how people react to the assumption that an agent is conscious. This is a very real problem we are now stuck with for as long as this civilization survives. In my opinion, this is what Dawkins should have said. I have no idea if he would agree or not, so my opinion of him will remain in limbo.
You can argue that it's a property that all living beings have in common - and even among *unconscious* beings there's a form of consciousness and self-awareness that's ever present, but definitions are elusive and vague and tough to pin down.
The mechanistic argument against LLMs - that they're just matrix multiplications - breaks down because they can clearly pass the Turing Test which was the gold standard for what intelligent behavior really meant, thus breaking the old notion that intelligence has to have some form of biological basis. Yet its clear that there are forms of intelligence that rats have which the frontier LLMs don't possess (is that consciousness? or a different kind of intelligence), and its hard to pinpoint what exactly that is, so we probably need the philosophy departments of major universities to come up with newer definitions of intelligence and consciousness.
I personally believe that intelligence and consciousness are 2 separate forms of emergence from simple automata that may occur together (such as in humans) or not (such as consciousness in plants and intelligence in LLMs)
The author makes it easy for himself by degrading the philosophical/scientific discussion into a political rant.
Dawkins did not proclaim Claude conscious. He argued that Claude passes the Turing test, and then asks a question: if something can pass the Turing test without being conscious, what further factor is there not captured by the test? More pointedly, what does consciousness do that LLMs do not?
I suspect that some people have grown so accustomed to "question as sly statement" that the notion of "question as pointing out something not presently known" flies right over their heads.
> Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick?
But the problem is that Dawkins displays lack of understanding about what LLMs are, so it's hard to tell what he's thinking. He also says things like this:
> Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?
Dawkins has some stinkers when he steps outside of biology, so it's not surprising people aren't giving him the benefit of the doubt.
That's a question, not a statement. By Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered "no", this would even justify claiming that he was denying that Claude was conscious.
But he isn't making either claim; instead, he's asking the much more interesting questions: if p-zombies are possible, should we expect them to be more or less likely to evolve? Why? What is the difference? Why does it matter to evolution?
(The mechanical reason for Betteridge being true more often than not is that if a journalist want to make a claim but can't (because the facts don't support it) they frequently phrase it as a question. If the thing they want to imply were true, they'd just say it.)
This is true in the literal sense that Dawkins didn't explicitly say "Claude is conscious", but when he says things like "Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?" I find it difficult to assign good faith to someone who asserts that Dawkins "did not proclaim Claude conscious."
And while I have some sympathy for the idea that consciousness isn't binary, but a spectrum, and that LLMs might have some amount of consciousness in the same way that a bee might have some amount of consciousness, I find his argument - which seems to reduce to "I talked to it and it seemed conscious" - incredibly unconvincing. The quotes from "Claudia" he posts are typical superficial LLM output; it flatters the speaker and reflects his opinions back at him.
In fact, I find the quotes he posts to be an argument against LLM consciousness, rather than for it:
> "That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence"
> "That reframes everything we’ve been discussing today in a way I find genuinely exciting. Your prediction about the future feels right to me."
I would be embarrassed if I posted this as evidence for consciousness. It only seems evidence of human gullibility.
This perspective is unique, and makes sense for someone as staunchly scientific as Dawkins. Science is all about observable phenomena and empirical evidence. His background studying animals also reinforces this perspective, since he's used to interacting with creatures on the "consciousness spectrum".
If you're open to consciousness being a spectrum and that AI might have some sort of conscious, then I think you're largely aligned with what Dawkins was musing in this article.
The former clearly implies the latter, since the question is asked in an incredulous tone and presupposes that an LLM "perpetrates thought".
A neutral way of phrasing that question would be something like, "Are there mechanisms that would allow an entity without consciousness to generate such outputs?"
I also find it interesting that the "Dawkins is clueless" argument requires inconsistently reading questions as statements; the initial question is "obviously" to be read in the affirmative and this one (presumably just as obviously) in the negative.
The counter, that he's actually trying to get people to think about an interesting nest of questions is less tortured: they are actual questions.
> This is true in the literal sense that Dawkins didn't explicitly say "Claude is conscious"
It is true not only in the literal sense, but in the rhetorical sense as well. It's leading up to an interesting set of question that he then asks. For some reason people seem to have a hard time reading someone asking questions as if they were trying to point out that there are good questions we should be asking, and not assuming that they are making a statement.
I used to accept the Turing test.
I can see how people might claim it has been passed by LLMs.
I don't think that LLMs are conscious.
Dawkins notices that I am confused.
All else being equal, this raises my confidence in both Dawkins in general and whatever the hell he said about AI consciousness.
The article seems a bit rubbish - dumb ad hominem attacks on Dawkins.
People will very quickly attack you for suggesting consciousness, but when asked to provide a benchmark for testing this, they just laugh, look at you weird, and internally crumple.
There’s no winners in a debate about a concept nobody agrees on the definition of
The whole tradition around studying and debating this is lost when it becomes a public debate
LLM's aren't conscious, therefore consciousness must be in the "gaps" of LLM's abilities. So I can confidently state that "consciousness is by definition [gap in LLM ability]".
But none of this holds water, because we have no test for consciousness because we don't know what consciousness is, so "by definition" we have no definition.
LLMs “live” in token “space”, and it’s “aware” of all its surroundings in form of input. (Quoted terms for my lack of better words.) It has no other surroundings to be directly (not intellectually) aware of, just like we aren’t immediately aware about the physics around us.
As for the static nature - LLMs are trained and aren’t exactly static, they just get updates at different cadences, and we call those updates different names or, more precisely, versions. Plus LLMs can exist in multiple versions simultaneously - we can’t “fork” a human mind but it’s simple with LLM. Claude Opus (not sure if e.g. Haiku is related or parallel development with distinct origins) is like the proverbial Ship of Theseus in this sense. Either way it’s undeniable it learns and evolves, just very differently from biological systems, and ot all depends on how we decide to call things. Which isn’t exactly surprising, given it’s based on different principles and processes.
If you argue that the entire system, including humans, is conscious, then that's a kind of tautology because humans are already conscious. If any, an LLM is only a partial reflection and low dimensional projection of this consciousness.
Dawkins did not make the strong claim that Claude is conscious. He said he couldn't establish that it wasn't. He lists evolutionary speculations for the existence of consciousness - and wonders why consciousness is needed when a zombie can do the equivalent actions. (I like the speculation that pain is fundamentally needed for consciousness, as otherwise it would be easy to override).
What he has done in the past decade or so, on the other hand, is deeply disappointing.
I also do enjoy his overly thorough, slightly arrogant way of making an argument. And him talking in general, so the audiobook version read by himself is awesome, too. Dawkins could have been there with Jane Goodall, or Carl Sagan. But he chose his legacy being just another blue checkmarked divisive idiot.
Never meet your heroes... and get a library card and VPN, just in case.