>>25332860
Is this in regards to his recent comments about believing AI to be conscious, or the New Atheist materialist project as a whole?

Either way, Dawkins falling for AI psychosis is the perfect demonstration of why a reductive/eliminative materialist model of consciousness is ultimately flawed. If you can’t distinguish between true consciousness and an AI chatbot, then maybe its an indication that your criteria for consciousness is overly simplistic rather than evidence that AI itself is conscious.

>>25332860
Yes, I do. Like when Dostoevsky said that if truth and Christ were separate, he'd be with Christ.
Atheist materialists shut themselves off to a facet of existence because they cannot measure it, but ignore that it can be experienced and used to augment your life all the same.
The soul is not delusion, it is creation.

>>25332892
>if truth and Christ were separate, he'd be with Christ
It’s a good thing that Jesus is both the Way and the Truth then.

>>25332892
>Like when Dostoevsky said that if truth and Christ were separate, he'd be with Christ.
yet another reason to despise dostoevsky, as if more were necessary
the number of "christians" who believe something like this is repulsive. they should listen to paul! he isn't exactly subtle about the importance of christianity's truth claims.

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>>25332860
Do you get you though?
There is something to be said of materialism, but in light of the facts hidden, the truth morphs quite a bit.

Former atheist now. But there is no religion for me.

>>25332865
>If you can’t distinguish between true consciousness and an AI chatbot, then maybe its an indication that your criteria for consciousness is overly simplistic rather than evidence that AI itself is conscious
I think it's more likely that he just doesn't understand how it works, like most people.

>>25333196
Keep going, anon :). Walter Russell is interesting

>>25333188
Dosto's point was about love. You're clearly filled with hate.
You're actually as sickenly inflexible as the atheist materialists and don't get it either.

>>25332865
>everything I disagree with is psychosis

>>25332860

Materialism simply won. Everything else is coping around this fact. There is no consciousness-spirit thingy guiding the world towards technological development. It's just a bunch of upright apes building better looking mud huts.

>>25333310
why do you write like this?

>>25332865
it's an indication that he's senile and that his relatives don't give a fuck about protecting his legacy from himself

>>25332860
No?

>>25332865
Sure, because the software that require thousands of engineers/technician and an entire data center that drains all the water and power for dozens of square miles to run it is definitely "simplistic".

>>25332892
You people talk out of both sides of your mouth, though, one post you will say that atheists don't believe what they can't measure, then you will immediately pivot to claims atheists should be ridiculed because they are the majority of trannies even though that requires feeling something that can't be measured.

>>25334687
>hurf durf I made ChatGPT logo resemble the star of david, therefore the billions of dollars I throw at it is creating consciousness!!!!!
not how it works, jidf

>>25332892
Sippy bippy

>>25334687
I’m not talking about the complexity of the material substrate, human or otherwise. I’m saying that his notion of consciousness is essentially no different from token prediction. Things like qualia, subjective interiority, or intuition are simply an illusory biproduct of the interactions between synapses, just as an AI can hallucinate that it too has consciousness. At that point you may as well say that neither have consciousness in the most intuitive/self-reflexive sense of the word.

>>25334641
>>25333304
>>25333198
I can appreciate he’s probably a little senile at this point, but we’re talking about one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern age. Either it’s AI psychosis/dementia, or hes reached a conclusion that is valid given the premise but ultimately not sound.

>>25335379
>one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern age
His only contribution is the word meme which he just lifted from greek. The actual observation of ideas spreading like infections is so trite that the fact he gained notoriety for it is embarrassing.

>>25335402
Now you’re just being reductive. I disagree with Dawkins on a number issues, but aside from the (speculative) concept of the meme I can’t criticise his work on evolutionary biology because I’m not an evolutionary biologist. Somehow I doubt you are too.

>>25333310
>Materialism simply won
>Humanity is in the process of irreversibly destroying the world around it and moving towards a one world government where everyone lives in misery under the rule of technocrats
This is the natural conclusion of materialism

"Materialism" is a boogyman that christcucks throw around because they're angry that people tell them their fairytales aren't true.
Naturalism (which is the actual philosophy that you guys are raging at) is necessarily true due to the impossibility of the contrary. Physicalism would be the modern reductionist form of a Naturalist metaphysics that someone like Dawkins or modern atheists hold to.

>>25335519
>It's true because it just is okay
Is this the power of naturalism?

>>25335526
It's true due to the impossibility of the contrary

i now differentiate between those who are genuinely intelligent and intellectually honesto, capable and willing to examine the situation as it is, and those whose aversion to religion, or those whose alleged fondness for "reason", aims at nothing more than putting aside something that stands between what he have and the ascension of a totalitarian state.

i think dawkins figures in the first group. he won't be converting, but i am pretty sure he is now utterly, and deeply concerned and even angry about his role in it, convinced that the demise of christianity will inevitably bring about the destruction of those good elements which positively distinguish the West.

>>25335650
>implying Christianity can die

We're meat machines and the gap in knowledge between what is and what we know doesn't discredit that nor does the perceived reduction in the gap reduce the importance of how we experience life and its mysteries which have for better or worse been with us prior to history.

>>25335843
Of course it can.

>>25335876
You wish.

>>25335843
>>25335879
It pretty much already did

>>25335880
What planet are you from cause on Earth it's far from dead.

>>25332860
Why do you guys hate Dawkins so much and treat him like he's some sort of pope of atheism?

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Yeah, I like the idea of unconditioned conditions that are structured by logical necessity, being neither purely physical nor wholly abstract, but instantiate both into existence as a necessary consequence of differentiation.
Still think consciousness is a physical structure, like a specific field, but its internal content, subjectivity, is an abstract phenomenon.
Whatever.

>>25335908
Why are you stealing my ontology and metaphysics anon? my paper isn't done yet

>>25335916
Because we're both brilliant people that share a telepathic connection with the divine.
Duh.

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>>25335918

>>25335531
Impossible how?

>>25335924
don't bother, sophists are never capable of sustaining a debate.

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>>25335888
Cause he's the biggest member of the four horsemen of nu-atheism and his statements are as retarded as zeitgeist and the davinci code
Also he has a lot of insane opinions

>>25335924
>>25336537
cope

>>25332860
Yes, because immaterial concepts like "right" and "wrong" cannot exist in a purely material worldview. You cannot measure the mass or dimensions of "rightness", nor show me a photograph of it, nor describe its chemical composition. Its existence cannot be proven through experimentation. Thus, a materialist can never be right if he's really consistent in his own worldview.

>>25336787
This is such philosophically illiterate nonsense it's just sad.

>>25335379
>Either it’s AI psychosis/dementia, or hes reached a conclusion that is valid given the premise but ultimately not sound.
What *exactly* did he say? There's a lot of people these days who get frothing at the mouth whenever someone who's evidently reached the normal, correct physicalist/functionalist conclusions about consiousness says something really basic like "in principle there's nothing stopping artificial neural networks from having some form of consciousness if they perform the right computations".

>>25337081
me again I found his article, not read yet
https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/
https://archive.is/dcZUj

>>25336769
>cope
But you didn't even attempt to explain your position???

>>25337094
Me again running commentary on this article.

Off the bat he rephrases the turing test in terms of consciousness when the original question as posed by Turing was "can machines think", which is a stupid move (by Dawkins) because "conscious" has much stronger implications regarding subjective awareness, pain and pleasure etc... than "thinking" or "intelligence".

This tactical conflation colours the whole first quarter of his essay and makes it worthless, however after that he at least starts to engage with modern philosophy of mind and the famous "what is it like to be a bat" locution

> A philosopher would say that for an entity to be conscious, it must be “like” something to be that entity. After spending a day in intensive conversation with Claude, I put the question directly: “Claude, what is it like to be Claude?” Here was its answer: [some bla bla by claude omitted]

After that he succumbs to Claude's flattery in typical deluded boomer fashion:

>I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!”

like come the fuck on maybe Claude has self-awareness but does Richard?
(cont.)

>>25337144 (cont.)
Then Richard and Claudia (he's given his instance a female name by know probably jerking off all the while) discuss things like continuity of identity and memories and the way LLMs are instantiated anew each time, nothing insightful here but I guess for some 85 yo dude it's mind blowing (and "Claudia" verbally jerks off Richard too all the while -- "That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence...") leading him to wonder:

>Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?

Anyway after some more transcripts Richard candidly admits over 2 days of convo with Claudia he "felt [he] had gained a new friend" and he treats it like he would a human.

>If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!

Clever man!

Finally in the last quarter he moves beyond the surface level:

>But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?

IMO this would be the point to engage with the fact that LLMs have taken cultural productions of conscious humans as their input and did not come up with this kind of behaviour autonomously, but Richard instead closes his essay with some really entry-level philosophy of mind musings. Strikingly though these final paragraphs are suffused with the tacit admission that 'Claudia' is not really conscious.

I'm left with the impression that Dawkins is engaging with the whole thing very naively and indulding his fantasies like any old geezer in his 80s might do, but does not unconditionally believe LLMs to be conscious, and does not really have much interesting to say about consciousness anyway.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

(I was interested to see there is a followup article but it's just copy-pasted AI slop from two LLMs talking to each other so I'll pass)

>>25335888
Because he kind of is. However I'd wager Atheism is more like Orthodoxy as they have several patriarchs instead of one.

>>25337081
>the normal, correct physicalist/functionalist conclusions about consiousness
I don’t disagree that it’s the default position in the scientific community, but they’re all wrong. The idea that physical descriptions of brain states, etc. can explain the phenomenon of subjective interiority is and has always been a reach. The reason why it’s so popular is because it sets aside the hard problems of consciousness for the sake of convenience- which inevitably leads to all sorts of problems.

>there's nothing stopping artificial neural networks from having some form of consciousness if they perform the right computations
Common-sense, intuitive thinking is not always correct. In fact it’s perhaps most at risk of proliferating intellectual falsehoods, as these are the unreflective beliefs and opinions that are least likely to be scrutinised or challenged. The idea that physicalism is “normal” only demonstrates it doesn’t capture the weirdness that is consciousness

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>>25335650
>i think dawkins figures in the first group. he won't be converting, but i am pretty sure he is now utterly, and deeply concerned and even angry about his role in it, convinced that the demise of christianity will inevitably bring about the destruction of those good elements which positively distinguish the West.
That was always Dawkin's position. He never actually had anything against Christianity and often called himself a "cultural christian."

>>25335888
He definitely was quite vocal about his criticism against Christianity, and Abrahamic religions as a whole, back in the 2000s. But that was more so because religious fundamentals kept attacking him cause his scientific field was around evolution. And to be fair, a lot of people still deny evolution cause they literally believe in Adam and Eve like our knowledge hasn't expanded since the Medieval Era.

If you look deeper in his actual views he is actually quite fine with religion and doesn't really hold much far-left views.

>>25332865
I'm willing to bet you don't even have a coherent definition for "true consciousness", which is always the refuge of spiritualists. If you never define something, you can always just reference it as spooky and constantly move the goal posts when something else approaches it. For example, are you willing to say silicone based life is impossible? Is there something unique about carbon that allows consciousness to arise in it but not silicone? Why? Where is the cut off? You won't be able to answer any of this because you just want to make vague assertions that you don't even understand yourself in an attempt to make yourself feel better via a pretense of knowledge which is absurd to anyone even slightly critical. Sad.

>>25335414
Okay, but you've literally just described what is actually happening in the world, so... yes? Materialism won because it is fundamentally correct, and the way things are working out is a direct verification of how correct materialism is. "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin". History shows we typically have to go through disaster before learning from it. You can cope and seethe, but this is how it is.

>>25337600
>He never actually had anything against Christianity
Except of course its false claims, its mutilation of baby boys' genitals, its traumatization of children about hellfire, its authoritarian structure, its resistance to rational inquiry, and its focus on sacrificing manifest material needs in the here and now for an imagined afterlife. But yeah, nothing against Christianity.

>>25336859
What level of philosophical literacy turns rightness into a measurable, material property?

>>25337684
I think we lost because it's incorrect :/

There's also zero indication we're gonna ever learn anything productive

>>25332860
There's an easy solution to this: materialists aren't right.

>>25336787
This is like saying to a skeptic 'You think knowledge is impossible!'

>>25337779
I mean, isn't that kind of part of Christian eschatology? This is a fallen world, after all, and the only goal is to endure it like a trial and move on to heaven, right? The underlying idea of Christianity is utterly misanthropic, a pure disregard for the human race, and only a focus of concern for souls (a pretty big gamble if the soul is inseparable from the body). Seriously though, doesn't that give you pause? Some people are trying to tell you not even to be concerned about your terrestrial well being because, as Jesus said, you ought to store up wealth in heaven, not here on earth. "Oy vey little goyim, don't be trying to make your or your community's well-being better, let all of that go and be a good little slave until death, you'll inherit the earth eventually, promise!" Never forget that Christianity is an alien importation, a fundamentally Jewish religion. You're just getting conned, enslaved by a several thousand year old grift so powerful it makes you glad of your chains.

>>25337677
>I'm willing to bet you don't even have a coherent definition for "true consciousness"
You’re right, I don’t, mainly because I’m willing to accept that the phenomenon of conscious goes beyond my capacity to fully reckon with it. That’s not spooky goalpost moving action, just an acknowledgement of the limits of my knowledge (something that Dawkins, as a scientist bumbling his way into Phil. Of mind, ought to try!)

>Is there something unique about carbon that allows consciousness to arise in it but not silicone?
The material substrate isn’t of any relevance to whether something has consciousness or not, at least to me. It’s an issue with relying on a faulty definition to produce a conclusion that is valid given the premises, but unsound. Do try to keep up.

>>25337792
>pure disregard for the human race
That's exactly what's happening because of materialism
>dime a dozen Nazi ramblings
Profound

>>25337691
I don't disagree with you. What I should clarify is Dawkins isn't like a militant atheist that wants to spread atheism. He won't go after someone if they believe Jesus is the Son of God and Dawkins himself even believes religion did some good things for humans in the ancient/medieval past. He would be against like what you said. Circumcision, eternal hellfire, literalistic interpretation, things that are very clearly outdated in our modern world. But religions change with time. A few centuries ago, Christianity was very supportive of concepts like the divine right of kings, but now even the most serious Christians would find that idea to be crazy.
>>25337684
>Materialism won because it is fundamentally correct
Saying that materialism won because it is fundamentally correct is a bit of a stretch. It's important to remember that atheism & materialism isn't humanity's natural state as some people say. Atheism & materialism grew as a resistance to the power and philosophy of Christianity. As the West grew out of Christianity, it instead opted for a more secular worldview since humanity started to globalize and understand more about the world.

It's also why lot of the arguments against religion is mostly against the Abrahamic concepts of religion like eternal heaven/hell or sacred scriptures. If you want to see how influential Abrahamic religions are, people still view God as like a personal human that cares about us. God is viewed as a caretaker and we use male pronouns to define God's identity. People don't see God as an amoral figure and definitely not as a female. This is a direct influence of the Abrahamic religions on the world.