No, Claude Is Not Conscious: Dawkins, AI, and the Train Illusion

Why Dawkins mistook Claude’s fluent imitation for consciousness, and why the Turing Test still cannot prove subjective experience. Really.

In 1895 the Lumière brothers shot a 50-second silent documentary. It famously captured a steam locomotive pulling into a station. Titled “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat“, it was first shown to the public in January 1896 in Lyon. A rather popular story is that when the film was first shown, the audience was … Read more

Bizarre Scientific papers: “Responding to Richard”

The journal Public Understandings of Science, has posted a truly weird “scientific” paper that is basically an assertion that they found some scientists who don’t like Richard Dawkins. To be precise out of a total of 20,000 they managed to find 38 who did not, and it is the personal opinions of those 38 that is … Read more

Richard Dawkins – Science Is the Poetry of Reality

Richard Dawkins was originally scheduled to give a talk at the Washington Reason Rally last weekend, but unfortunately due to the minor stroke he had a couple of months ago in February, he was not able to travel. He did however record a message that was played there, and that is now online on YouTube. … Read more

Summary of the Richard Dawkins AMA

A few days ago Richard Dawkins popped up on Reddit and did a AMA (Ask Me Anything) session. As you might expect there were thousands of comments and so only a small subset of the questions could be addressed in any meaningful manner … It started as follows … Hello Reddit. This is Richard Dawkins, ethologist … Read more

NECSS have apologised to Richard Dawkins and re-invited him

You might, or might perhaps not be aware, but Richard Dawkins has had a stroke while at home on 5th February, has been in hospital, but is now back home. He has issued an update that includes a NECSS update .. Within the above update he describes his stroke and what he felt at the time, then describes … Read more

A few final pointers regarding Richard Dawkins & NECSS

This is a topic that I’m more or less done with for now, but before I move on I wanted to add one last posting that contains a couple of links that consist of some quite good writing on it all. I  should add that putting links to them here does not necessarily imply I endorse … Read more