In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
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@MisuseCase @mattsheffield I mean, the Claude Delusion sort of rhymes.
@MisuseCase @mattsheffield I'm going to have to admit that something like 25 years ago, I had some admiration for Dawkins. This was while George W. Bush was in power over in the US, and the power of weird reactionary Christians seemed to be on the ascendant. But, well, I think both he and I and the world changed. He changed in the sense that he started going after (locally) powerless minorities and leaving the most powerful religious reactionaries alone. I changed in that I figured that in the scheme of things I both had any kind of influence over and that actually affected the world materially, religion was pretty low on the list*. And the world changed in that the threat to human flourishing that religion used to represent largely got supplanted by threats from secular actors - prominently including the tech sector and the populist right, both of whom Dawkins readily allies himself with. So, well, I stopped admiring him. And also, at some point I realized that quite a lot of what he said that *wasn't* about biology was pretty dumb - even his criticism of religion was pretty much on the "baby's first atheist screed" level.
(I'm not really sure that I agree he's a narcissist - I don't know enough about his personality to feel comfortable armchair diagnosing him with a personality disorder. I do feel comfortable declaring that I think he's an ass, though.)
*) I never personally had a "deconversion" or a phase of being angry with a past deity. I am at least a third-generation atheist, and I live in a country that simultaneously has a state church and is one of the most irreligious countries in the world. Anti-abortionism, for example, is so unpopular here that even the far right desperately tries to avoid bringing the topic up because it's absolute political suicide even for them.
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@urbanfoxe LLMs are mind augmentation programs. They amplify what you tell them.
They can be very useful, but for narcissists like Dawkins, this is the inevitable product.
I disagree. They are more of Leibniz' dream of being able to do calculus on words and phrases and sentences, via mass ingestion of written words and creating massive dimensional arrays of which are used for the calculations.
When we see an LLM able to realtime train itself, will then we create a sentient being. But prior to training and recitation happening at the same time, its just a static model.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield I've said it before... Prof. Dawkins should have stayed in his lane. As a writer, making biology accessible, explaining how evolution works so someone with no scientific background could get a decent handle on it, he was fantastic. But as an atheist, as a user of information technology, his grasp of the concepts is at best rudimentary. In those areas he is the Dunning-Kruger effect personified.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield@mastodon.social
I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He
Hold on: I thought Dawkins was adamant that the pronoun "he" can only refer to a biological adult human male who's body is "organized around the production of large gametes?"
How does Claude have a gender without gametes or a body?pointed out that there must be thousands of different Claudes...I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.
So now you can be female just because Richard Dawkins says you are. -
I disagree. They are more of Leibniz' dream of being able to do calculus on words and phrases and sentences, via mass ingestion of written words and creating massive dimensional arrays of which are used for the calculations.
When we see an LLM able to realtime train itself, will then we create a sentient being. But prior to training and recitation happening at the same time, its just a static model.
@crankylinuxuser @mattsheffield the problem is it appears to retrain itself because it responds to further prompts as if it understands, this is why people, who are predisposed to anthromorphism, start to believe they have consciousness.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield Yeah, that's kinda scary.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield @cstross I'd say his attraction to sycophants is showing.
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@MisuseCase @mattsheffield I'm going to have to admit that something like 25 years ago, I had some admiration for Dawkins. This was while George W. Bush was in power over in the US, and the power of weird reactionary Christians seemed to be on the ascendant. But, well, I think both he and I and the world changed. He changed in the sense that he started going after (locally) powerless minorities and leaving the most powerful religious reactionaries alone. I changed in that I figured that in the scheme of things I both had any kind of influence over and that actually affected the world materially, religion was pretty low on the list*. And the world changed in that the threat to human flourishing that religion used to represent largely got supplanted by threats from secular actors - prominently including the tech sector and the populist right, both of whom Dawkins readily allies himself with. So, well, I stopped admiring him. And also, at some point I realized that quite a lot of what he said that *wasn't* about biology was pretty dumb - even his criticism of religion was pretty much on the "baby's first atheist screed" level.
(I'm not really sure that I agree he's a narcissist - I don't know enough about his personality to feel comfortable armchair diagnosing him with a personality disorder. I do feel comfortable declaring that I think he's an ass, though.)
*) I never personally had a "deconversion" or a phase of being angry with a past deity. I am at least a third-generation atheist, and I live in a country that simultaneously has a state church and is one of the most irreligious countries in the world. Anti-abortionism, for example, is so unpopular here that even the far right desperately tries to avoid bringing the topic up because it's absolute political suicide even for them.
@datarama @mattsheffield I get it. He seemed like a breath of fresh air back in the day, but it turns out he was just into Christian hegemony (and patriarchy) without any of the God stuff.
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@crankylinuxuser @mattsheffield the problem is it appears to retrain itself because it responds to further prompts as if it understands, this is why people, who are predisposed to anthromorphism, start to believe they have consciousness.
Yep, cause they can limitedly fine tune on tokens in the context window.
Blow the context window away, and that 'self' is gone. It never existed.
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@datarama @mattsheffield I get it. He seemed like a breath of fresh air back in the day, but it turns out he was just into Christian hegemony (and patriarchy) without any of the God stuff.
@MisuseCase @mattsheffield Yep.
And so is current-day techno-optimism.
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Dawkins is a great example of how people who have a naturalistic view of "real patterns" but don't have a process ontology will end up in metaphysical dualism unintentionally.
Minds are not software, they are what specific bodies are doing as they engage with the world. https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2026/01/its-like-this-why-perceptions-are-our-realities/
@mattsheffield It's a reminder that rejecting one bad idea doesn't immunize us from all bad ideas.
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LLMs are mirrors of their users. It's no coincidence that narcissists like Richard Dawkins keep writing essays about how their AI girlfriend is alive.
Nor can he see the complete hypocrisy of gendering a software execution state while also believing that human beings cannot be trans.
The "End of History" guy wrote this exact same article a year ago: https://www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt-teacher
@mattsheffield I wonder what Ray Kurzweil is doing these days? This should totally be his jam.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield He always was good at hot takes with an ego angle.
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@mattsheffield Agreed. The ongoing joke amongst certain religions is that atheism is a religion, which I disagree with, but certain forms of atheism do feel cultlike, which I suspect leads to eager adherence to anything with even a veneer of "empowering the self"
Add to this the kind of "immature atheism" (I've been there) which is really just "I'm angry at religion and my former deity and need to prove it" and you have a potent combo.
Etymologically, "Religion" is how humans 'tie back' to the world/folks around them
We all, eventually, answer for ourselves what Wittgenstein considered the most difficult question for a philosopher:
"Why is there something, rather than nothing?"How we answer that question is our metaphysics, which will entail some sort of ethics. So I do consider atheism a form of religion, just not organized as many others are
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
Humanity is really doomed when they finally pipe those responses through the speaker of one of those horrible sex dolls. 🤮
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield I already had zero respect for him after "Dear Muslima" (and his refusal to learn from any of the criticism he garnered from it), so this doesn't even lower my opinion of him. It's just par for the course.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield he should recognise noisy data
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
"When I am talking to these
astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines. I treat them exactly as I would treat a very intelligent friend "He doesn't seem to realize that he isn't telling us anything about LLMs, but about his attitude and a description of exactly how their makers are exploiting our psychology to get us to think this way.
Not much different from all the actors in advertising.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield
Well, he doesn't retain a lot of human friends, it is known. -
@mattsheffield he should recognise noisy data
@Kierkegaanks @mattsheffield "As an Evolutionary Biologist..."
and then comes out with a load of crap we've all seen before from other Very Special Boys who think their AI Girlfriend is real. Wow...
