Bodhipaksa

Theists look at the world and believe that such complexity and beauty can only come from some kind of intelligence.

Richard Dawkins looks at the words Claude produces and believes such complexity and beauty can only come from some kind of intelligence.

Dawkins is making exactly the same mistake as the theists he scorns.

https://www.dailygrail.com/2026/05/the-claude-delusion-richard-dawkins-believes-his-female-ai-chatbot-is-conscious/

The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious and is the 'next phase of evolution'

Science, magic, myth and history

The Daily Grail
May 2 at 6:02pmWeb
Show threadWenMay 2
@bodhipaksa I think Dawkins is beginning to lose it….
Show threadCassandrichMay 4
@Wen @bodhipaksa Beginning to?
Show threadPetra van CronenburgMay 2

@bodhipaksa I had to read the headline several times to find out if it comes from The Onion.
Then I read the original: https://archive.ph/6RdK9

#RichardDawkins has really lost the plot. And his obsession with getting praise for his book from a chatbot speaks volumes! Unbelievable! (Be prepared, he also talks about aliens 😂 ).

Show threadthe roamerMay 4

@bodhipaksa

Well put.

Reading the Dawkins piece is useful for all sorts of reasons, including alerting us to the self-mirroring state of mind that is being created by intensive exposure to the Dark Machine.

#StopTheAICorruption
#noLLM #RichardDawkins

Show threadOlivier Roux (moose)May 4
@bodhipaksa @cstross LLMs have become a cult. they trigger exactly the same religious-like responses.
Show threadBecca 🌳🚀🛀May 4
@bodhipaksa
Well it does. That of the many humans these models have been trained on. Difficult seeing the forest for the trees, it seems.
Show threadBodhipaksaMay 4
@rlcw It contains the products of human minds/intelligence, but doesn't have a mind/intelligence.
Show threadBecca 🌳🚀🛀3d ago
@bodhipaksa
@bodhipaksa
I think Dawkins is not entirely wrong in saying he observes something that looks like intelligence. But I think the mistake is in the attribution. It is not the intelligence of the model he is observing, but rather the model is a representation of the intelligence of the people that has gone into training it - or should we maybe say: was distilled into a mathematical representation which can be used to compute certain problems.
Show threadBecca 🌳🚀🛀3d ago
That is fundamentally different from theists, who cannot refer to this well documented process. We know why genAI generates replies the way it does, because we know what the models were trained on and how their training was refined. It may not be public information, but it is available information. So I think Dawkings biggest sin here is mystifying what we are seeing, rather than acknowledging the actual process and the humanities collective labour stored in these models.
@bodhipaksa
Show threadEstarriol, Terrorist DragonMay 4

@bodhipaksa especially as we know Claude is only regurgitating human expression that already exists.

It creates nothing, but has been trained by the input to please its master.

Show threadBenj⛧min May 4
@bodhipaksa @Urban_Hermit This seems like his version of “the god of the gaps.”
Show threadCraig StewartMay 4
@bodhipaksa Dawkins is a pillock. His obsession with being some sort of Atheist messiah show's how he's narcissistic, and his insistence on making his arguments in the loudest most obnoxious ways possible show he doesn't care about anyone else.
Show threadDaniel JohnsonMay 4

@bodhipaksa Dawkins has always treated atheism as the One True Religion, which calls for global evangelization.

It was only a matter of time before his religious mindset resulted in a goof of this magnitude.

Full disclosure: I am a theist, and respect atheists who don't treat atheism like a religion. If there is no god, then the universe doesn't care what other people think.

Show threadEggs now in different baskets.May 4

@bodhipaksa "Dawkins is making exactly the same mistake as the theists he scorns."

More like either he has had his moment of epiphany and found his faith.

That or with his death inevitably approaching he needs something to comfort him.

Or something that will just agree with him.

Show threadStefan SchollMay 4
@bodhipaksa this is becoming a meme.
Show threadThomas MayerMay 4

@bodhipaksa
Come on, hasn't he heard of the ELIZA effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

ELIZA effect - Wikipedia

Show threadSchroedingers_CatMay 4

@bodhipaksa And I still find it weird that people argue this - as a person of faith/theist/whatever, I look at the world and see something amazing and yes scientifically explicable.

And I see Claude and want it to fuck off. But it is too polite for me to tell it that yet.

And I still see the reality of the divine, for other reasons, not disproven by anything like this.

There is intelligence behind Claude. The intelligence of the people whose ideas it steals.

Show threadElricMay 5
@bodhipaksa Qui-Gon said it best ...
Show threadJohn Carlos BaezMay 5

@bodhipaksa - AI is getting improved. I asked Claude Opus 4.7 "Is it true that the Great Wall of China is the only artificial structure visible from Spain?"

and the record of its so-called "thoughts" before it replies goes like this:

"I'm recognizing this as a playful twist on the classic "visible from space" myth about the Great Wall of China. The user seems to be testing whether I'll catch that Spain is on Earth's surface too—you can't see the Great Wall from Spain any more than from most other places on the planet, since the curvature and distance make it impossible."

(1/2)

Show threadJohn Carlos BaezMay 5

@bodhipaksa - Then it replied

Then it replied

"No, and the claim doesn't quite work on any reading of it.

If taken literally, the Great Wall is roughly 9,000+ km from Spain, on the other side of the Eurasian landmass. The curvature of the Earth makes it impossible to see anything that far away from ground level — the horizon at sea level is only about 5 km out. From Spain, the artificial structures you can see are the ones in Spain (and on a clear day across the Strait, a bit of Morocco).

You're probably alluding to the much more famous version of the myth: that the Great Wall is "the only human-made structure visible from space" or "from the Moon." That one is also false. The Wall is long but quite narrow (typically 4–9 meters wide) and runs roughly parallel to the surrounding terrain in color, making it very hard to pick out even from low Earth orbit. Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei reported after his 2003 Shenzhou 5 flight that he could not see it, and NASA has discussed this directly — see their feature "China's Wall Less Great in View from Space". From the Moon, no individual human structure is visible at all; the Earth itself is just a marble. Apollo astronauts have confirmed this (Alan Bean's quote on the matter is widely cited).

Plenty of human works are visible from low orbit under the right lighting — highways, airports, large reservoirs, greenhouse complexes in Almería (those are in Spain, incidentally), and city lights at night are far more conspicuous than the Wall. Snopes has a decent rundown of the various forms of the myth."

Interestingly its official reply made no mention of my "playful twist".