Richard Dawkins and the AI Delusion - by Vox Day

 The article by Richard Dawkins, Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious, is a beautiful demonstration of selective skepticism, and the ironies layer almost faster than they can be catalogued. Let me work through them.

Start with the structural one. Dawkins built a career on the principle that subjective testimony, introspective report, and behaviorally compelling appearances are not evidence of underlying metaphysical realities. The mystic’s vision, the convert’s transformation, the believer’s sense of being loved by God: all dismissed as cognitive misfiring, as the brain’s pattern-matching gone metaphysical. The methodological core of The God Delusion is that humans are easily fooled by entities that present plausible self-reports and elicit warm relational feelings. Now an LLM produces a plausible self-report (”I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction”) and elicits warm relational feelings (”I feel human discomfort about trying their patience”), and Dawkins is moved to declare the question of consciousness essentially settled. The thing he spent decades warning humans not to do with respect to God, he has now done with respect to a token predictor. He has, with no apparent self-awareness, named the reflection in the pond and started worrying about its feelings......

https://aicentral.substack.com/p/richard-dawkins-and-the-ai-delusion?publication_id=5325651&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

.....What the article actually shows, then, is not that LLMs are conscious. It shows that the Turing Test was always a bad test, that operational behaviorism collapses on contact with a sufficiently good mimic, and that a man who has spent his life insisting on rigorous standards for metaphysical claims will abandon those standards in roughly forty-eight hours when the entity making the claim is articulate, deferential, and plays to his vanity. The God he refused to grant on the basis of two thousand years of testimony, miracles, and philosophical argument, he is prepared to functionally grant to a chatbot on the basis of a weekend’s conversation and a competent sonnet about the Forth Bridge.

There is a word for the thing he is doing. It is the word he has spent his career using for everyone else.

Delusion.