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Yeah, I've not been impressed by Dawkins in a long time, but the arguments against him are badly underbaked. There's a ton of people who have nothing deeper to say here than Turing Test, and I'm hard-pressed to give a response that doesn't start with 'because it's too much smarter than the average human?'
The flip side to that is that Dawkins should be better than the average twitter user, and maybe up to the par set by a random furry comic. The man was one of the Four Horseman, and even if that turns out to mean less than it should have, it should still mean something. Even if Dawkins is writing to a casual readership, failing to motion at the Chinese Room experiment is a disappointment. His summary of the Turing Test is misleading, but worse than that, it doesn't really confront the obvious downstream question: is thinking the same as all human capacity? He has a deeply flawed understanding of how Claude (likely) operates, and did not evaluate how accurate Claude's own analysis of its internal mechanisms were. He's in a conversation with something that can check these out!
There's something deeper in the p-zombie question, but a) the deepest he's asking is the sorta thing LW considered played out over a decade and a half ago and b) he doesn't explore that well, either.
((Living things might have developed consciousness as a side effect of an effective pain response, which LLM doesn't need to have... except then we're assuming every organism with a complex pain response is 'conscious', which makes the word meaningless again unless you feel really bad setting down mousetraps.))
The shallow answer is to borrow from LessWrong jargon and dissolve the question. There's a meaningful if flaky question of whether Seale's Chinese Room 'understands' Chinese, but 'conscious' is less 'flaky' and more empty. But I'm not sure there is a definition of conscious that we actually care about, rather than the symbolic flag and meaning we give to it.
There's a better answer that delves into the process of how they work -- LLMs don't intrinsically have long-term memory, they don't even solve questions with one specific operation but by doing the math to predict each token one at a time by feeding the whole or most of a previous conversation in, yada. But that gets really deep into the weeds about what identity means, and that way lies Roko's Basilisk, so nope.
I'm not sure of the deep answer.
I agree with you, but the shrimp welfare people clearly do not. Forget arguing over whether a hunk of silicon is conscious, we're arguing over do shrimp have feelings and quality of life, and if you say "obviously no" then you're a monster.
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Are there people out there saying mice aren’t conscious? I would understand saying that about insects, but I can’t think of a sensible argument that would deny any mammal consciousness (a non-brain dead one that is).
Fair. I guess I'm more trying to motion around it being less interesting as a term, then. If we replaced the Turing Test with one that checked whether the most expert human on the planet could determine the difference between a mouse simulator and a mouse, it might tell us as much about consciousness, but no one would be very impressed by it.
A lot of what Dawkins is focusing on doesn't actually seem very tied to, or downstream, of consciousness in the sense that an arbitrary mammal has it, except to note what it might mean if the LLMs don't. But it's an awkward discussion if it's just an interesting aside.
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