His point was clear. It’s a stupid point, because it misunderstands what Claude is.
Claude is not a being. You are not speaking to an individual. You are not speaking with anything, actually. You are interfacing with a machine trained to accurately guess words that produce an acceptable result. There is no consciousness to exist, it’s an absurd idea to connect with this technology.
the point @RichardDawkins is making is:
if Claude can code/do philosophy/engage in conversation and is not conscious
and a human with late stage dementia who can't speak is "conscious"
then the definition of "conscious" is broken and fundamentally useless
which is obvious
shushing a baby is funny. imagine you’re really upset about something, and someone just says to you “there there” and it just worked?? and you just go to sleep.
“midlife crisis” and it’s just someone realizing they hate their life and deciding to use their freshly discovered free will to actually try to find out what they like and do things they enjoy
I think the world‘s reaction to AI being one of desperate acceptance shows how desperately everyone wants to leave behind the dull, digital administrative bog in which we have found ourselves.
Such widespread usage of what would normally be objectively viewed as an experimental technology, whose cost/benefit is nowhere near clearly defined, appears to be a mystery until one realizes that society is a whole wishes for nothing more dearly, then to be able to stop filling out, endless forms, checking endless email, signing up for managing endless accounts, and generally feeling like our own secretary in a simple never-ending torrent of digital information.
Even though AI objectively, even today, remain illogical, inconsistent, untrustworthy, plagiarism, and generally decently ineffective when applied to many real life, day-to-day scenarios, even normal, non-– techie people who would usually never dream of adopting an experimental technology are willing to give it a try if it offers even a glimpse of hope that they might be able to escape this never-ending, ever changing, endlessly complex, digital landscape.