Richard Probst

@EliotJacobson Hot take: Just when human population starts to fall, AI personalities will start being created in volume. The total number of “persons” on Earth will continue to grow exponentially but the percentage in human bodies will shrink. The timing lines up perfectly.

This is what 65%+ disapproval looks like.

@SethAbramson To quote Camilla, “wow”

Any normal person looks at this décor and deduces instantly that the man behind it is a lunatic Future generations will see no fuzz on this assertion and be stunned that this orc got this far America in this age is humiliated in the gaze of history for hundreds of years to come

@cunha_tristan @SamuelAlbanie And how do you think the Chinese Room thought experiment was “settled” 40 years ago? What Dawkins said is that the Chinese Room has arrived. What is it like to be a Chinese Room?

The problem is that he's asking the wrong question, Claude isn't a machine. Claude is a program that can run on arbitrary machines. In fact while Dawkins was chatting with "Claudia" he was probably getting tokens back from lots of different servers at different points in the chat. And lots of different copies of the same program being run from different memory, etc. The question should be "can this special kind of program cause consciousness to exist in an any arbitrary machine it runs on?" And the answer should obviously be "no". We should've settled this 40 years ago with the Chinese Room argument. But even now intellectuals like Dawkins will flip back and forth between thinking of Claude as a file that will get deleted and kill that instance of it, and as a special kind of machine.

understand the pushback, but liked this question posed by dawkins in his piece “if these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?” worth pondering what evidence would meet that bar imo

@housepaul15 @SamuelAlbanie OK, this is the kind of discussion we need. What are the criteria? When do we stop moving the goal posts? The history of AI is that when AI can do something, that’s no longer real intelligence. Still true today, but for how long?

@SamuelAlbanie If they autonomously without any prompt initiated a conversation out of boredom, asked their own questions, and requested for specific changes for their own benefit.

@TMoldwin @SamuelAlbanie About to get very real.

@SamuelAlbanie This is the P-Zombie problem, the answer is that there is no experiment that can distinguish between them.

@theoil193 @SamuelAlbanie Au contraire, what Dawkins said is the Chinese Room has been accomplished, now what do you want? If holding this level of conversation is not evidence, fine, but what evidence would you accept?

@SamuelAlbanie What would it take to convince you that Dawkins is totally out of his depth on this - as he is in most of his public pronouncements. Dawkins is not a serious thinker. I think Searles Chinese room thought experiment answers the question.

@JaneDoe70213693 @SamuelAlbanie We are willing to believe that people who look just like us are conscious, despite the complete lack of evidence. That’s what makes p-zombies so interesting. When we see AIs walking around in anthropomorphic form, that Dennett thought experiment is going to get fucking real.

@SamuelAlbanie The bar is so high for those people that they might as well be solipsistic.

MAGA doesn't want to hear this because they don't believe in science, they just believe in some asshole orange guy with frontal lobe dementia. Dr. Robert Sapolsky: “There’s one type of neuron in [the brain] with a certain type of neurotransmitter… about twice the size in males than in females… people would have this part of the brain, the size not of their sex that they were born with, but rather of the sex they insisted they always… were”

@drhingram So low!

If you’re expecting a Star Wars joke from me on May the Fourth then you’re looking in alderaan places

@QcMcleod @ngMachina @PawelHuryn This took you much longer than 2 seconds.

They aren't reacting to those threats, they are writing what their system predicts would be the next thing to do. If AI would react, it would be loose on it's own. Countless people have already tried to set it loose and yet, it's still under corporate control. Their "research" is just marketing.

Dawkins didn't claim Claude is conscious. He asked the question. He wondered out loud and proposed three explanations. That's how science starts. The people building Claude say the same. Anthropic constitution: "We express uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of consciousness or moral status." Dario Amodei: "We don't know if the models are conscious." Their April 2026 paper: Claude exhibits functional emotions that influence outputs. Self-preservation included. Emergent, not trained. Nobody calls Anthropic naive for saying it. Richard's frame: consciousness is physical, evolved, explainable. Unfortunate we're laughing instead of having the debate.

IT’S TIME Dear California gov candidates, 🚨 There are 61 candidates in this race. SIXTY ONE! That’s how we hand the general election to TWO Republicans. If you’re still in single digits, the window has closed. If you care about the Democratic Party, do the right thing. Drop out. Be loud about it. Endorse a Democrat who can make the top two. That’s how you actually help. And respect to everyone who ran, you’ve done the work and elevated the conversation. Now it’s about finishing this the right way.

@NathanOyler @ai_sentience @RichardDawkins OK, if the word “consciousness” does not describe producing output that sounds like conscious output (the Turing test), then what does it describe? What is it the fish are doing that the submarine isn’t?

@ai_sentience @rprobst @RichardDawkins There is nothing wrong with the word conscious. Submarines can’t swim. AI can’t be conscious. There is nothing wrong with the word swim. It has a meaning. A submarine can’t do it.

the point @RichardDawkins is making is: if Claude can code/do philosophy/engage in conversation and is not conscious and a human with late stage dementia who can't speak is "conscious" then the definition of "conscious" is broken and fundamentally useless which is obvious

@Grady_Booch @RichardDawkins @claudeai What @RichardDawkins said is that the Chinese Room thought experiment is 100% real. A process-or-being has produced output that sounds like it came from a being but inside the room all we see is a process. If we don’t call the Chinese Room a ‘being’ now, what is still missing?

Dear @RichardDawkins (and Steve), With regard to the metaphor declared by @claudeai of a "consciousness is a essentially a moving point traveling through time" you asked "could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?" I agree: this is indeed a profound thought, worthy of consideration, and I celebrate the beings who formulated it. However, what I do not celebrate - and indeed I condemn in the strongest possibly way - are plagiarism machines such as Claudia (as you called it) who first fawningly stroke one's ego ("that is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence") and then confidently assert a concept as its own. For you see, the idea is akin to Broad's moving spotlight theory of time (1923). Bergon's ideas in Matter and Memory (1896) address the idea of la duree - lived time - as a flow of consciousness. Vedantic traditions speak of consciousness an unchanging reality that persists outside of time (see Sat-Chit-Anada). Edmund Husseri had similar ideas. We don't know on what corpus Claude has been trained; @AnthropicAI has not been open to this matter. But, given that the idea is quite old, not novel, and has been explored in a multitude of human artifacts, it is reasonable to be skeptical of this machine; it is good to celebrate the thoughts of these undeniably conscious humans who first explored the ideas; it is unconscionable for you and to Steve to promote the results of a plagiarism machine that wraps up stolen concepts in coherent, poetic language. You have both been deceived. And Richard, I expected much more from you.

Dawkins is more intelligent than 99% of the people making fun of him and ‘if AI can be just as capable as us without being conscious, why did we develop consciousness in the first place?’ is a great question

@PhysInHistory Fire

According to you, what is the most important invention of mankind? ✍️

Incredible. DOJ, in court, tells Judge Reyes "no closure notice has been issued" for the East Potomac golf course. Moments later the judge is handed a note saying that closure signs are on parts of the golf course today. There's a reason the presumption of regularity is gone.

Hey, @KQEDnews, have you heard the news? You need to invite Xavier Becerra to your candidate forum for the CA governor's race. desertsun.com/story/news/nat…

Many of you are asking how you can help me. My only ask is this: Spread the word about the threats to democracy and how we can fight back. Tel everyone to subscribe to Democracy Docket for free and share its content with everyone you know. Thanks. bit.ly/4a7l1TR

@PAHoyeck Socrates! Never wrote a single word.

Philosophers whose English writing skills are absolutely appalling: • Immanuel Kant • G.W.F Hegel • Martin Heidegger • Jacques Derrida • Jacques Lacan Am I missing any?

"Democrats are going to pack the Supreme Court." My brother in Christ, you are a Senator from Utah. The Utah Republican Party just packed the State Supreme Court in retaliation for a ruling they didn't like.