[LeCompteSftware]

The broader point Marcus is making is that ignoring arguments based on causality and plausibility goes against decades of Dawkins's philosophical atheism. Why not believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Reality is consistent with its existence.

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.

[codeulike]

Turing test was definitely and conclusively refuted in the 1960s

Are you sure?

Understood properly, Turings Imitation game aka the turing test, should be adversarial. That is, the player should be asking hard questions to try and discover who is who, not just having an idle chat. No chatbot has been able to consistently pass an adversarial Turing Test until the rise of LLMs

The Imitation Game:

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_a...

[LeCompteSftware]

The fact that LLMs often score as "more human" than actual humans is a downstream consequence of ELIZA tricking people into thinking it had a glimmer of consciousness. The Turing test was refuted because it was proven scientifically meaningless in the 1960s, and LLMs only reinforce that.

[dpark]

What refutation are you referring to? Surely you can cite how it was "proven scientifically meaningless" some 6 decades ago.

[LeCompteSftware]

I did with the Weizenbaum link, but here's a specific refutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

The Turing Test is totally meaningless, as was conclusively demonstrated some 6 decades ago. It is a test that measures how well your program can fool humans, which means "intelligence of the computer" is hopelessly conflated with "social engineering chops of the humans who programmed the computer." Any computer scientist who takes it seriously should be deeply embarrassed because they are spouting sci-fi adjacent nonsense, not actual science. Actual science involves updating your priors based on evidence.

[dpark]

I must have missed your earlier link.

Eliza did not disprove the Turing test, though. What it showed is that it’s easy to pass a very scoped test that doesn’t allow the user to actually broach general topics. Anyone communicating with Eliza for general conversation should quickly discover that it’s running a script. Just “What time is it?” breaks the script.

The Turing test was never that a computer could convincingly simulate a human convincingly in a very narrowly scoped scenario. Certainly the Eliza effect is interesting because it shows that people can assume emotion where it doesn’t exist (they do the same for other humans, by the way), but it does not disprove the Turing test.

> Any computer scientist who takes it seriously should be deeply embarrassed because they are spouting sci-fi adjacent nonsense, not actual science.

This sentiment seems to be expressed a lot from people who want to insist machines can’t be conscious. This retreat to shaming those who disagree is a tacit admission of a weak position.

Convince with logic and facts if you have them.

[cv5005]

Yeah I dont think a single current LLM would fool me in a turing test - I would obiously use all kinds of prompt injection techniques, ask about 'dangerous' or controversial topics, ask about random niche facts in varied fields, etc.

[codeulike]

Thats a good point actually, I hadn't thought about deploying hacks and jailbreaks in a turing test but thats exactly what should be done, if its being done adversarially

[rfv6723]

I think this conflates atheism with a much stronger form of causal rationalism.

Dawkins-style atheism is not “reject anything without a complete causal model.” It is a rejection of hypotheses with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and unlimited ad hoc flexibility — like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Consciousness is different. It is first a phenomenon, not an already-settled causal model. We do not believe humans, infants, or animals are conscious because we possess a complete mechanism for subjective experience. We infer consciousness from a cluster of phenomena that need explanation.

So the lack of a full causal account warrants caution, not denial. It is reasonable to say current AI gives weak evidence for consciousness. But that is not the same as saying AI consciousness is equivalent to believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[LeCompteSftware]

The point is "Claude is conscious" is a hypothesis with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and by denying that non-human consciousness is relevant to the discussion it gains unlimited ad hoc flexibility. I am relating this to plausibility and causality because there is a much more rational causal explanation for Claude seeming conscious than it actually being conscious: it imitates human (modern Western) consciousness via big data. Since this is a totally different causal mechanism than human consciousness, and since Claude has nothing in common with non-human animals, and since we don't need consciousness to explain Claude's behavior, "Claude is conscious" is overwhelmingly less plausible than "Claude is a sophisticated but ultimately brainless chatbot."

It is truly irrational - and hostile to scientific thought - to believe Claude is conscious. It truly is believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[dpark]

All the claims that AI can't be consciousness seem to mostly be using "consciousness" as a scientific-sounding word for "soul" and asserting that machines can't have souls.

> Since this is a totally different causal mechanism than human consciousness

A causal mechanism for what, exactly? Could you kindly define consciousness in a rigorous way so that Dawkins can see why it doesn't apply to Claude?