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I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR you say "what LLMs are doing is a counterfeit" which suggests a real output produced through different means.
If I have a counterfeit Rolex, nobody denies that the watch can tell time. A counterfeit human isn't a human and it's not made by nature, but the implication is that it's effectively doing the same thing. That's a different thing than the author starts out saying.
I think it's important that when you talk about consciousness, you pin down exactly what that means. Does it require the entity to have a mechanism for experiencing emotion? For exhibiting reasoning ability? For exhibiting characteristics of common sense? I don't think it's a useful definition to say, flatly, "does the things an adult human does through the same mechanisms".
... But its a longstanding position in philosophy (i.e. not everyone might take this position, but its a well known one) that discussion about consciousness should perhaps only really concern itself with the outputs.
The gist of Dawkins short piece is basically "we always used the turing test as a yardstick for consciousness, it seemed unachievable for a long time. Now thats its been achieved, what is the rationale for moving the goalposts?". And I think thats an interesting point to make. Dawkins maintains that the Turing Test should be enough, by making a point about competence:
Here's dawkins piece:
https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution...
Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
.... 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? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?
It is extremely implausible that Claude is the only conscious entity on Earth which does not have desires or motivations or any understanding of its own reality. It only does what the human operator wants it to do, unless it's malfunctioning or under-engineered, in which case it gets quickly fixed. This sounds suspiciously like a tool or a toy. And I'm amazed at how many people haven't caught on to the fact that it has no insight into its own consciousness: it only repeats human philosophical debates. If it were conscious, surely it would have something novel to add here.
There are no causal mechanisms for it being conscious, whereas there are causal mechanisms for it imitating human consciousness. The most plausible explanation is that it's highly sophisticated software which has a lot in common with human writing about consciousness, but very little in common with the consciousness found in chimpanzees.
The more basic problem is that the Turing test was definitely and conclusively refuted in the 1960s, when ELIZA came pretty close to passing it, and absolutely did pass it according to Dawkins's standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum Dawkins is only engaging with pop sci and infotainment.
At this point, 'person who is popularly thought to be intelligent thinks AI is conscious' should make you question the first part, not endorse the second.
[1] https://ewtn.co.uk/article-famous-atheist-richard-dawkins-sa...
Marcus is saying "Well, if you knew they were trained to mimic, then you'd understand it's just mimicry and not real consciousness" The problem with this argument is that we just don't have a good idea what "real consciousness" is. What if, in order to simulate human text prediction with sufficient accuracy, the model has to assemble sub-networks internally into something equivalent to a conscious mind? We could disprove that kind of thing really quickly if we knew how to define consciousness really well, but we kinda don't!
Philosophers are genuinely split on this question, it's totally reasonable to be on either side of this based on your personal intuition. Marcus's position seems to be actually based on his own personal incredulity, despite his claims that understanding LLM training methodology gives him some special insight into the internal experience (or lack thereof) of an LLM.
(The Claude Delusion is a banger title though)
Even people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson don't go on and on about "atheism" for a reason; there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing."
You have a mistaken understanding of what atheism is. It is not a belief in anything, but an absence of belief in a deity.
> there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing."
Sure, and yet theism is part of 75% of the world population and influences everything from education to politics. It's perfectly reasonable to talk about atheism within appropriate settings.
To be 85 and lack basic wisdom is quite an astonishing achievement.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me.
Sort of like how the collection of particles you see as a tree doesn’t look like that without being passed through a bunch of brain hardware. If we want to be pedantic we can accurately say that trees don’t exist, but given that physical object and tree are constructs in the human brain it’s pretty convenient to just treat them as “real”, while at the same time understanding that at some granular level they aren’t truly “real” (and at some further granularity we actually have no clue what’s real).
At least the zealots who knockon my door. I've had a few good conversations.
Ditto for LLM sentience. We have no evidence either way.
And the older I get, this does make sense to me. Belief in a soul doesn't really require proof for me. I understand that this may not be satisfying in an academic way for some, but "humans have souls and machines probably don't" strikes me as the wisest default position until we have some other very strong proof otherwise.
Wouldn't the wise position be that since there is no evidence of souls at all that the default should be that both humans and machines do not contain a soul until proven otherwise?
And if the theory of evolution is true, at what point did “humans” begin to possess souls?
I imagine people don't dig it because it can be woo and vibey, but the older I get the more I understand the value of the "imprecise" metaphysical/religious/etc whatever you want to call it.
Someone in this space who handles this very well, unlike Dawkins, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Maybe the lesson is that all those public intellectuals are not that wise and we should follow people more that stay in their lane.