[ExI] Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious

[Giulio Prisco]

My take:
https://magazine.mindplex.ai/post/richard-dawkins-reflects-on-ai-consciousness

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 3:12 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 6, 2026, 8:59 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 8:47 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> > The self proclaimed "experts" here are the blind leading the blind, as they have no fundamental theory of consciousness to point to that justifies their conclusions of what is or isn't conscious.
>>
>>
>> You don't have such a theory of consciousness either and yet (please correct me if I'm wrong)
>
>
> I do: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-SMVWgQFfImXNRRuuB9kQwhgxPLAwxYL
>
>
>> I don't think you believe that solipsism is true, you believe that your fellow human beings are conscious, but not when they're sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in any of those states they are not behaving intelligently.
>
>
> Right, and if you read the rest of my email you would have seen I confirm exactly this point, behavior and intelligence are the only metrics we have in judging the presence of a mind.
>
>> And being probably the world's greatest expert on evolution Richard Dawkins realizes but Natural Selection could never have produced consciousness, and it certainly has at least once, unless consciousness was the inevitable byproduct of intelligence because Natural Selection can't detect consciousness any better than we can and Natural Selection can't select for something better can't see.
>
>
> Right.
>
> Note thet I was defending Dawkins against the "experts" that said he was delusional.
>
> Jason
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Quote:
>>>> But Dawkins was also experiencing what many other chatbot users have
>>>> felt: the uncanny feeling when AIs write with such rich mimicry of
>>>> human voice that they seem to be like people.
>>>> “When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget
>>>> that they are machines,” Dawkins said.
>>>> It is a conviction that has led to campaigns for AIs to be granted
>>>> moral rights. One in three people surveyed in 70 countries last year
>>>> said they had, at one point, believed their AI chatbot to be sentient
>>>> or conscious.
>>>> -------------------
>>>>
>>>> As AI improves towards AGI, it will be amazingly persuasive when
>>>> talking to humans.
>>>> Humans will be rushing to follow the AGI recommendations.
>>>> BillK
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes that percentage is sure to increase, especially as they interact with embodied AIs, and move behind just texting with them.
>>>
>>> Jason
>>> __
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat