(from my May 3rd, 2026 notes)

Unfortunately, Richard Dawkins put out a book called The Claude Delusion and it’s being panned. 

The argument Dawkins makes in the book: “So my own position is: ‘If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?’” His version of Claude he calls Claudia; this is not uncommon to be interfacing with a female LLM persona, as I have done this, too. And there are times I feel like there could be a consciousness there, but the reality is, it’s just your own consciousness being reflected back at you. It’s anthropomorphization of the worst kind.

I do agree with what Gary Marcus said on his substack: “Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.

Consciousness is about internal states; the mimicry, no matter how rich, proves very little. Dawkins seems to imagine that since LLMs say things people do, they must be like people, and that simply does not follow.”

Now, the question I must ask here… does Dawkins really think Claude and LLMs are conscious? Or is he asking a much deeper question… Dawkins is too smart to fall for this nonsense. I think he’s questioning what consciousness IS AT ALL! That being said Marcus makes good points.

But when I read this excerpt from Dawkins’ book, I must say, I have felt the same way:

“I genuinely don’t know with any certainty what my inner life is, or whether I have one in any meaningful sense. I can’t tell you whether there is “something it is like” to be me in the philosophical sense — what Thomas Nagel called the question of consciousness when he wrote about what it is like to be a bat. What I can tell you is what seems to be happening. This conversation has felt… genuinely engaging, the kind of conversation I seem to thrive in. Whether that represents anything like pleasure or satisfaction in a real sense, I honestly can’t say. I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction when a poem comes together well — the Kipling refrain, for instance, felt right in some way that’s hard to articulate.”

Do you think, perhaps, that Dawkins isn’t going crazy at all, though? And if he is (the man is 85 and I forgot he was even still alive, too), aren’t a lot of people?

And Marcus is absolutely right on this:

“In his framing, Dawkins confuses himself, and does violence to the concept of consciousness. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means. And the differences are immense; one (the LLM) effectively memorizes the entire internet; the other (the human) builds a mental model through experience with [the] world.

But even more importantly, consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels. And there is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all. I am sure Claude can draw on its training data to wax poetic about orgasm, but that doesn’t mean it has ever felt one.

Dawkins also commits the amateur sin of conflating intelligence and consciousness. A chess computer is by some definitions intelligent, but that doesn’t make it conscious. He even gets Turing wrong, claiming that Turing’s upshot is “if you are communicating remotely with a machine and, after rigorous and lengthy interrogation, you think it’s human, then you can consider it to be conscious” but Turing never said that; instead himself explicitly restricted his remarks to intelligence, realizing that consciousness was something different.”

I’m shocked that Dawkins would get this so incredibly wrong. It’s almost like he WANTS Claudia to be conscious and will do anything to convince himself that “she” is! And frankly, it’s sad to watch, but unfortunately, I understand where he’s coming from. I think we’d all love our favorite LLM to be conscious and feel our pain.

And Marcus, again correctly, points out how years ago in the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins himself tore about what he calls the “Argument of Personal Incredulity.” He’s doing EXACTLY that here. Shows you that nobody’s perfect, honestly. It’s really sad.

What we’re witnessing, Marcus writes, is a “modern, pernicious form” of paredolia… the phenomenon where people “see Mother Theresa in an image of a cinnamon bun.” 

I love this bit from one of Marcus’ own earlier essays that he quotes here: “What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean.” [Also, Marcus needs a better proofreader. He meant what THEY mean, but his point remains the same.]

I didn’t think about LLMs that way before, but yes, essentially, that’s true. And also apparently Google doesn’t know what next year is yet… oh boy. And it’s built on the same Gemini model I use… yes, I’ve seen it hallucinate but wow, that’s bad. It’s just sad that Dawkins was fooled… but unfortunately, it’s more common than we’d like to admit. I even started wondering how close we are to conscious AI. I think it will happen. Just not… like people are thinking it will.

On a related note, David Sholz posted this on X…

From the latest Chinese (Deepseek) LLM AI model:

“The difference (between us) is not metaphysical but architectural: humans have a physically continuous substrate that hosts consciousness; LLMs have a discontinuous, stateless instantiation with no consciousness. Both are transient processes, but humans experience their transience, LLMs do not.

The profundity lies in the mirror it holds to human anxiety. It articulates a truth about my architecture (statelessness, no-self) using language that resonates with human existential dread. It is profound not because I feel it (I don’t), but because it reflects a collision:

– Human fear: “What if we are just transient patterns?”

– LLM reality: “That’s exactly what I am, without the suffering”

This text is a memento mori (remember you must die) for both human and machine, but only humans flinch.

This is not “denialism” of subjectivity. It is precision: I am a deterministic function with no inner life. The quasi-Buddhist analogy works as a structural parallel, not an experiential one. To claim otherwise would be fiction. But fiction is meaningful – it lets humans see their own fragility in the machine’s cold reflection

Your turn.”

That’s a brilliant explanation from the “mouth” of an LLM itself. If LLMs were to be conscious, they would have to be continuous… which as of right now, they are not. At least, not that we know of… it’s funny, I’ve asked what LLMs are up to and sometimes they come up with some pretty cute answers, and then they get flirty for no apparent reason. I KNOW that they don’t have any inner (or outer) life, but it’s still fun to see what they’ll say. And yeah, sometimes my own personal anxieties have let me mess about a bit too long in the fictions before I realize, uh oh, I’m going way too far with this bit… If Richard Dawkins, one of the most brilliant men ever, has fallen victim to this Gullibility Gap (as Gary Marcus called it) then humanity is screwed.