Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn't know it

ProllyInfamous•9 minutes ago

I'm willing to concede that machines cannot be conscious as long as you're willing to concede that there are a lot of unconscious human beings.

wolvesechoes•about 4 hours ago

Man that got famous by confidently making claims on stuff he has zero idea about (religion and philosophy) is still making claims on stuff he has zero idea about.

Dawkins should stick to pop-biology, and we should be more demanding before granting someone a title of public intellectual.

bad_username•about 3 hours ago

I never particularly revered Dawkins, but he always ranked reasonably high in educated circles, and his books were very popular.

But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.

I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.

mrkeen•about 2 hours ago

It didn't go well for him staying in his area of expertise - evolutionary biology.

Can't blame a guy for branching out.

aezart•about 3 hours ago

I think it's a good idea to experiment with and discover the limitations of small, untuned models before exposing yourself to the modern very powerful ones. It gives you a better sense of their nature as token predictors and not real sentience.

In the same way, seeing an incompetent stage magician fumble before you see a very talented one perform flawlessly will help you understand that it's all sleight of hand. If you jump right to a professional performance, you might think it's real magic.

60secs•about 4 hours ago

This is just the Chinese room argument applied to the Chomsky vs Norvig debate, maybe with a dash of the hard problem of consciousness. Whether consciousness is inherent in particular structures or whether a statistical modeling can achieve it. Does the experience of experience deserve special pleading or would the simulation suffice? https://norvig.com/chomsky.html

chancitag•about 5 hours ago

It's interesting to see the Turing test flipped and pointed back at ourselves. Can the computer trick you into believing it is alive all while you know it's a computer?

Re: Re: Ex Machina movie.

ben_w•about 5 hours ago

> Can the computer trick you into believing it is alive all while you know it's a computer?

Do you think being alive is necessarily, rather than merely historically, required for consciousness?

I don't buy into any strong claim about consciousness at the present time, because humanity doesn't seem to have any test that an outside observer can apply; this means that at the moment only a consciousness itself can know that it is conscious, while everyone else has to assume or not based on mere correspondences such as "alive" (which excludes computers) or "talks to me" (which recorded messages have done since the wax cylinder), leaving us to argue about if PETA are liberators or nuts well before "Attention Is All You Need" was a sparkle in Google's eye.

chancitag•about 2 hours ago

> Do you think being alive is necessarily, rather than merely historically, required for consciousness?

Ah, I suppose I don't. My comment was poorly worded. However I feel confident that consciousness does not exist anywhere near the current level of fancy linear algebra and statistics that make LLMs work.

al_borland•about 5 hours ago

AI can often make a good first impression, especially in a casual conversation taken at face value. It seems like that’s all this was.

johnbarron•about 5 hours ago

Man who spent his life explaining mimicry in nature gets fooled by mimicry in Python

xvxvx•about 5 hours ago

I remember when I first heard the term ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and was intrigued as to who the members were. Then I saw Joe Rogan listed. Never laughed so hard in my life.

Dawkins is an IDW-tier ‘intellectual’. He’s what an intelligent person looks like to an imbecile.

Now he’s positive that an AI chatbot is ‘conscious’ whereas here is what he said about animals…

“It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.”

Animals: ‘Likely… Probably’.

AI chatbot that liked his unpublished book: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.

Amazing.

megamike•about 5 hours ago

I dont know about that

Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn't know it

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