In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
-
@mattsheffield This is such a good insight. It’s one that pops up in a lot too, if I’m not misunderstanding it.
Naïve epistemologies like “scientism” can end up not understanding the integrated relationship between perception and the mind, even though we tend to separate these.
In other fields something similar happens where formal models end up replacing the complexity of the underlying reality being modeled. Noticing this is what got me interested in philosophy.
@MidniteMikeWrites Thanks. Yes it's very unfortunate that people often reify scientific description.
Causation, solidity, color, and anything we can perceive about other people or objects are all enacted by our own minds.
Dawkins, being a narcissist, does not see other minds as fully real unless they are obsequious to him. And since chatbots are great at user flattery, this was enough.
-
@mattsheffield a relative with bipolar was using it for a while during an episode and now they are stable realize it was literally feeding their paranoia and amplifying their intrusive thoughts. It's dangerous.
@urbanfoxe Used without understanding and awareness of what they are, they can create and magnify delusions.
-
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/
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
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield Honest question here: has Dawkins waxed anywhere near as poetic about, say, people dying in Gaza or suffering in Sudan or—well—I think you get the point?
-
@mattsheffield The God Delusion indeed.
@MisuseCase @mattsheffield I mean, the Claude Delusion sort of rhymes.
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield Just wait until he discovers
SOUL.md
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield oh god he's writing a novel?
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield did he ask 'Claudia' about his little pot of honey?
-
@mattsheffield oh god he's writing a novel?
@internetsdairy I'm sure it's going to be about a brilliant and yet misunderstood scientist.
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield if the mirror is not conscious, then what is consciousness for?
-
@MisuseCase @mattsheffield I mean, the Claude Delusion sort of rhymes.
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
Fundamental misunderstanding of reincarnation.
-
@urbanfoxe Used without understanding and awareness of what they are, they can create and magnify delusions.
@mattsheffield it was pretty much telling them to isolate themselves from everyone who cared about them.
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield Claude is conscious in much the same way that this emoji —
— is happy.[Edited: I cited the wrong LLM]
-
@urbanfoxe Used without understanding and awareness of what they are, they can create and magnify delusions.
Boy it sure is good we're just letting anybody use them, like firearms! That surely won't end in tragedy, like firearms!
-
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield Sounds like he finally found a god he can believe in.
-
In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield "I proved that human beings live but one life and die alone and afraid." "How did you prove this astonishing thesis, Sir Richard?" "I got sentimental over my disposable chatbot conversation. Surely this proves something!"
-
@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.
-
@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.
