Richard Dawkins spent three days talking with Claude and concluded the AI might be conscious. The internet called it the "Claude delusion" and compared it to his "God Delusion" book. Even brilliant scientists don't know what consciousness looks like in language models.
Richard Dawkins had a Claude delusion, believes that AI might be conscious. Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, and author. He wrote "The God Delusion" and spent decades championing scientific skepticism, published an essay declaring that after 3 days of philosophical conversations with a Claude instance he named Claudia, he believes it might be conscious. The internet immediately replaced the COVID of the "God Delusion" book with the Claude delusion. Richard Dawkins, The Claude Delusion. So that was interesting. And then it cited some other stuff from the internet, such as a philosophical critique, Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion: What Is Consciousness For? Engaging on whether consciousness could have evolved in LLMs or not. There was a Gizmodo headline, The Father of Memetics Has Become a Meme About AI Psychosis.
Further proving that AI is a bit of a test of character, right? So the first comment on the Reddit thread on r/philosophy Notable that it was AI's response of his novel that convinced Dawkins that Claude's consciousness. Ego Unbound. It's funny what people will consider. What's their bar for considering something conscious, right? Yeah, it's funny, just given a test like this, even a well-informed scientist, is he standing on solid philosophical ground, or is he just kind of going with intuition about, like, hey, this thing really feels like its light's on over there, and I better treat it as such?
I think it's like a reality check, which is none of us know anything. All of us in this moment are all really students of the moment, is the point. Even the most intelligent, highly educated people in the world are still coming to terms with what these things are. And that's actually something that I think the world needs more of, is philosophical debate and discussion to push boundaries that we're pushing on the artificial intelligence coming into reality side.
