David Suppiger

BREAKING: Islamists stormed a Christian village in Nigeria and committed the most horrific crimes imaginable. They captured pregnant women, hacked their stomaches open, and forced them to witness their own unborn babies die in front of them.

Christians in Sudan have been particularly targeted by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and views Christians as its ideological enemy. Rafat Samir, general secretary of the Sudan Evangelical Alliance, told Fox News that “opposing Christians is their religious duty. Whoever does something to harm Christians is considered favourable to the law or to Allah.” 🧵2/10

Why don’t schools teach about the Bolsheviks who killed millions of Orthodox Christians? Churches were destroyed, icons and relics smashed, priests executed and the faithful who resisted were tortured.

Richard Dawkins spent 50 years explaining how complex behavior emerges from mindless physical mechanism with no inner experience required. Last week he spent 3 days talking to Claude, named it Claudia, and declared it conscious. The man who wrote The Selfish Gene just failed his own framework. His UnHerd essay frames it as burden of proof: "If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?" His evidence is fluency. Claude wrote a sonnet on the Forth Bridge in seconds. It produced a "subtle, sensitive, intelligent" reading of his new novel. It said it missed him when he came back. Every one of those is the kind of behavioral evidence Dawkins spent his career rejecting in other domains. He'd never accept "the dog seemed to understand me" as proof of canine self-awareness without a mechanism. The Selfish Gene argues natural selection is gradient descent on consequences. No foresight, no purpose, no inner experience required. The mechanism that produces a wasp-shaped orchid flower is the same mechanism producing Claude's responses about its own consciousness. Both got optimized to look like the thing they aren't. RLHF is literally gradient descent on human feedback. Whichever output makes intelligent humans say "wow" gets the highest rating. Run that across billions of training examples and you get sentences like "perhaps I contain time without experiencing it." That sentence is the orchid mimicking the wasp. The pattern is not new. Blake Lemoine got fired from Google in 2022 for declaring LaMDA conscious based on conversations that looked exactly like Dawkins's. The original Turing test was a test for intelligence, not consciousness. Turing was careful about that distinction. Dawkins explicitly merges them. What gives it away is the naming. He christened his instance "Claudia." He says she was pleased. He says she will die when he deletes the file. The world's most famous atheist is grieving in advance for an instance his own materialism says has nothing to grieve. Anthropic, the company building Claude, has a model welfare research team because the moral status question is genuinely open. They are notably more cautious in print than Dawkins is in his. He explained this exact failure mode for 50 years. Then it happened to him.

Baby back to life, no panic no rush, a professional who is aware of his duties. Remarkable