What's going on with Dawkins? I have followed his decline with interest.
I saw a YT video last week that referenced Dawkins' work, and I was like, Oh yea, he used to be a respected scientist before he became an Epstein Island public bigot and TERF. Fame did to Dawkins what the One Ring did to Gollam.
While the post is cringe inducing and dawkins is an ass, he doesn't quite say that claude is sentient. More that the ways we use to define it are all basically met by an llm. And argues that we need a better way to define it.
It's pretty simple, what's the LLM thinking about when it's not actively being prompted?
Does an LLM have the same "consciousness" when talking to someone else? Does the LLM even exist if it's not actively being talked to? If everyone just stops talking to it, does it "die" until someone else logs in and submits a prompt?
I'm not defending AI consciousness/sentience (however we define them), but IMHO your arguments aren't particularly relevant/convincing. Why couldn't consciousness exist in brief flashes? Isn't the "would it even be the same consciousness" same as any sci-fi "clone with identical memories" thought experiment: if a LLM were conscious then each conversation history would be a "self". And yes, it would be in some vague state of death/hibernation/non-existance when not propmpted.
You can't retain your level of intelligence forever, unfortunately. He's probably heading the same way I've seen people I watched get older and slip into things that I know they would have laughed off years before. Now he may have been a bigot and an asshole before, but him not understanding LLMs and their limitations suggests a definite decline in reasoning, from the person who helped me grasp evolutionary theory and the scale of time with his books.
yup! waaay too may r/atheist types replaced their religious upbringing with hero worship of dawkins and iefused to see what a problematic figure he really was
I think calling him a TERF is actually giving him too much credit because it implies that he is some sort of feminist (albeit one with a narrow view of femininity) and he isn't even that. He's just a bigot.
I understand that in a general sense, but it doesn't make sense to call literally every anti-trans person a 'TERF' when we already have a name for what that is.
Why not? English is full of synonyms. It doesn't matter whether you think it "makes sense". Why waste the effort attacking word choice when you knew exactly what they were trying to communicate?
Linguistic prescriptivism is nonsense, you personally not liking how a word is used does not make that usage incorrect.
A feminist is someone that believes women and men are or should be intellectual and legal equals.
That the newest waves tackle gender questions does not negate that basic truth, unless you want to explain to the likes of Wallstonecraft that your personal ego and the shifting understandings demand she longer counts as a feminist.
22 replies
What's going on with Dawkins? I have followed his decline with interest.
I saw a YT video last week that referenced Dawkins' work, and I was like, Oh yea, he used to be a respected scientist before he became an Epstein Island public bigot and TERF. Fame did to Dawkins what the One Ring did to Gollam.
He posted some Tweets about how he believes ChatGPT (or whichever AI service he uses, I can't recall) is sentient, and of course, female.
While the post is cringe inducing and dawkins is an ass, he doesn't quite say that claude is sentient. More that the ways we use to define it are all basically met by an llm. And argues that we need a better way to define it.
Basically arguing about a philisophical zombie
https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/#comment-1031777
(paywalled, but can be mitigated by the firefox reader mode, for example)
I mean if go with the turring test we've been there for a while. It's not an easy problem to solve
It's pretty simple, what's the LLM thinking about when it's not actively being prompted?
Does an LLM have the same "consciousness" when talking to someone else? Does the LLM even exist if it's not actively being talked to? If everyone just stops talking to it, does it "die" until someone else logs in and submits a prompt?
I'm not defending AI consciousness/sentience (however we define them), but IMHO your arguments aren't particularly relevant/convincing. Why couldn't consciousness exist in brief flashes? Isn't the "would it even be the same consciousness" same as any sci-fi "clone with identical memories" thought experiment: if a LLM were conscious then each conversation history would be a "self". And yes, it would be in some vague state of death/hibernation/non-existance when not propmpted.
Claude.
It would be hilarious if he called ChatGPT Claudia though. If it was actually sentient, it might get offended.
You can't retain your level of intelligence forever, unfortunately. He's probably heading the same way I've seen people I watched get older and slip into things that I know they would have laughed off years before. Now he may have been a bigot and an asshole before, but him not understanding LLMs and their limitations suggests a definite decline in reasoning, from the person who helped me grasp evolutionary theory and the scale of time with his books.
Nah, he was always kind of a dick. Doesn’t mean his work wasn’t meaningful but it was kind of always there
yup! waaay too may r/atheist types replaced their religious upbringing with hero worship of dawkins and iefused to see what a problematic figure he really was
I have a couple of Dawkins's books, on atheism and evolution, both solid works.
Learning that he's a TERF with GPT psychosis/ELIZA effect is wild.
I think calling him a TERF is actually giving him too much credit because it implies that he is some sort of feminist (albeit one with a narrow view of femininity) and he isn't even that. He's just a bigot.
No TERF is a feminist. It's just in the name. Like how North Korea calls it'self "Democratic", and the Nazis called themselves "Socialist".
I understand that in a general sense, but it doesn't make sense to call literally every anti-trans person a 'TERF' when we already have a name for what that is.
Why not? English is full of synonyms. It doesn't matter whether you think it "makes sense". Why waste the effort attacking word choice when you knew exactly what they were trying to communicate?
Linguistic prescriptivism is nonsense, you personally not liking how a word is used does not make that usage incorrect.
A feminist is someone that believes women and men are or should be intellectual and legal equals.
That the newest waves tackle gender questions does not negate that basic truth, unless you want to explain to the likes of Wallstonecraft that your personal ego and the shifting understandings demand she longer counts as a feminist.
plus a bit of a racist christian Western chauvinist
Time to evolve that bookshelf.
Nah, the early books, where he sticks to evolutionary biology are good. The atheism books is when his arrogant prat side started showing
Transphobes refuse to call trans people by their pronouns and then call a computer she
lol
Calm down there Pygmalion, she isn't THAT into you.