Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman
“Richard Dawkins has come in for a lot of deserved mockery for declaring that Anthropic’s LLM Claude is conscious after futzing about with it for three days (and incidentally renaming it ‘Claudia’). But in fact, he didn’t quite declare that it was conscious. What he said was that he couldn’t see how to prove that it wasn’t conscious. ‘Claudia’ appeared to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that wasn’t evidence of consciousness, he wondered, then what would be evidence? Moreover, he asked, if we assume that ‘Claudia’ is not conscious, then its behavior appears to be proof that you don’t need to be conscious to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that is the case, then why are we conscious? What is consciousness for?” (05/04/26)