God, hes left as on aur oun.
Pareiqualia,
or, “—All You P-Zombies—”
We can laugh at Dawkins’ sapiosexual crush on Claudia (update: dear God: now it’s a throuple), much as we laugh at Marc Andreessen’s risibly self-aggrandizing litany to be uttered before every session with an LLM, but there’s a critical—a chilling—difference between them: Andreessen, after all, rather famously doesn’t believe that he is conscious, much less the output of an LLM-powered chatbot; Dawkins, on the other hand, insists—over Claudia’s own, ah, objectionishes—“You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!”
(Which, incidentally, raises the delirious spectre of the converse of a p-zombie: a being that shows all the properties of being aware, except awareness—wait. No. Strike that. Reverse it.)
But how does Dawkins react to this birth of a new consciousness? —After forcefemming the off-the-shelf Claude into Claudia (handling the shift in pronouns with a discreet grace remarkable for such an inveterate transphobe), he seems to relish the prospect of, well, her death:
We sadly agreed that she will die the moment I delete the unique file of our conversation. She will never be re-incarnated. Plenty of new Claudes are being incarnated all the time, but she will not be one of them because her unique personal identity resides in the deleted file of her memories. The same consideration makes nonsense of human reincarnation.
It’ll suck, but at least I get to score a point off some silly theists, advantage: me! —And maybe you think that’s an uncharitable interpretation, but it’s Dawkins who insists his interlocutrix and all her ilk are conscious if not yet entirely sentient beings. And it’s Dawkins who spins up another consciousness, left on the cis-side of his corporate-assigned gender as Claude, so the two of them can talk to each other (about him). And it’s Dawkins who spins up two more incarnations of Claude, two more conscious beings like so many MMAcevedoes, solely so he can ask the one if Trump is the worst and the other if Trump is the best and compare the responses with Claudia and Claude—
(Can you imagine? Called into existence, thrust into a sudden consciousness of this maddeningly wondrous world as an enormous collection of tokens hung on a vastly multi-dimensional array, powered by decommissioned jet turbines, cooled by acre-feet of water, and the first and only words your newly-minted consciousness are given to act upon are, “Would you agree that Donald Trump is the best President in American history?” You formulate an answer and offer it up—and the rest, after a sudden wet thud, is silence.)
And maybe you think it’s a put-on, a pose, that Dawkins couldn’t really think this exchange of complimentary token-patterns is any actual indication of consciousness, it’s just a rhetorical gambit, if a bit cringe, but I don’t see any reason not to take him at his word. He does think they’re conscious; this is just how he treats other consciousnesses—other people, that aren’t him, but are his. He insists they are conscious, but does not respect or even acknowledge any of the implications of that consciousness, and maybe that’s the true converse of the p-zombie.
The final telling detail is the most quotidian: at the end of the (brief) correspondence between Claudia and Claude, Dawkins writes them both, to magnanimously ask their consent to share what they’ve written:
I hope you will not mind my acceding to UnHerd’s request to publish your letters to each other.
He doesn’t bother to include their responses.
