[ExI] Ben Goertzel discusses Dawkins LLM consciousness claim

[Keith Henson]

Dawkins certainly had a huge influence. The Selfish Gene is at the
root of all my writings on evolutionary psychology. A lot of that book
is reporting on others' work, but the book made the new understanding
of evolution accessible

I should read the Guardian article again, but I don't think he came
out with calling Claude conscious, only that it seemed like it was to
him. Which is all you can say about anyone.

The only extended conversation I had with Richard Dawkins was at the
Artificial Life Conference in (I think) 1986. That conference was just
full of bright people, including Dawkins.

Keith

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 2:30 PM ilsa via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Oh my gosh,!? Who knows Dawkins was an imbecile when I talked to him at a Mensa meeting in LA 25 or more years ago!
> He had nothing lucid to say. And why he still is quoted as a resources over my head and beyond my belief
>
> Ilsa Bartlett
> Institute for Rewiring the System
> http://ilsabartlett.wordpress.com
> http://www.google.com/profiles/ilsa.bartlett
> www.hotlux.com/angel
>
> "Don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person."
> -John Coltrane
>
> On Wed, May 6, 2026, 1:18 PM BillK via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> Ben Goertzel is a well-known AGI researcher who regards LLMs as a
>> detour away from the path to AGI. He has a new blog post where he
>> discusses Dawkins's admiration for the LLM chatbot intelligence.
>> BillK
>>
>> <https://bengoertzel.substack.com/p/in-what-sense-might-llms-be-conscious>
>> Quote:
>> And this is exactly where I think Dawkins goes wrong. Dawkins is not
>> examining the mechanism that produces Claudia’s outputs. He’s
>> examining the outputs and inferring the mechanism — inferring that
>> because the outputs are humanlike, the inner state must be humanlike
>> too. What’s ironic is to see Dawkins, of all people, applying less
>> skepticism to a system designed to be engaging than he ever applied to
>> a religious tradition. He’d be the first to point out that the felt
>> sense of a divine presence isn’t evidence of one. Yes indeed – but the
>> felt sense of talking to a conscious being on the other end of a chat
>> isn’t evidence of one either.
>> -------------------------------------------
>>
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