dawkins at 85 is more lucid than anyone commenting on this piece. they try to make it some hamfisted victory in their culture war without reflecting on the referent at all

@tszzl @agenda2033 Agreed. The takes on this have been so painfully stupid, from people who probably couldn’t understand the key ideas of Dawkins’ popular works, let alone his academic output.

@doodlestein @tszzl @agenda2033 where are you guys coming from? he's making a basic ontological error and you guys are running to defend him? who gives a shit about his track record, this is retarded

@transfix @tszzl @agenda2033 Let me guess, you are absolutely convinced that even the very best frontier LLMs are glorified autocomplete mechanisms with no understanding or cognition of any kind. So Dawkins must be an idiot, right?

@doodlestein @tszzl @agenda2033 they are literally just computer programs like any other computer program. They just manipulate and process symbols. If you make it generate an image of an apple, you don't get an actual apple. You need more than just the program. So yes, he is an idiot and borderline schizo

@transfix @doodlestein @tszzl @agenda2033 So could you give use the exact moment on the evolution time line where consciousness starts? If you built an exact simulation of a human mind I don't think you could deny that was consciousness. So it isn't the substrate.

@TaeTimeCode @doodlestein @tszzl @agenda2033 A high resolution philosophical zombie could convince anyone casually but never be conscious. It's not even clear that consciousness is something that evolved at all or is something out of the organism. But one thing consciousness will never be is a simulation in a computer

@transfix @doodlestein @tszzl @agenda2033 How can you possibly know that other people are conscious and not zombies? Maybe you are the one entity experiencing consciousness. I can't guess what you are trying to say by "something out of organism". Are you implying humans are special or souls for certain creatures?

@TaeTimeCode @doodlestein @tszzl @agenda2033 You can't. But you can be absolutely certain that if you ran a program that perfectly simulated a woman you're fixated on and you put her in the perfect robot body, the real girl wont have access to the simulation's state, it's a different entity, not the person. A symbol of her