On AI consciousness, the Turing test, solipsism and Richard Dawkins' new essay

In partial defense of the great evolutionary biologist and public intellectual's view of Claude

In discussions about AI safety, I usually try to avoid getting dragged into the issue of whether AI can be conscious, because in that context it is mostly a distraction, and tends to invite the all-too-common misunderstanding that in order for AI to pose an existential threat to humanity, it first needs to attain consciousness. But there are other ways in which the issue of whether AIs are or can be conscious is extremely important, such as in considerations of the moral nightmare that perhaps by inadvertently creating sentient AIs we thereby also create astronomical amounts of suffering. So now that the juiciest incident in the debate over AI consciousness since the Lemoine affair back in 2022 happened last week, I will nevertheless allow myself to comment on the topic.

The incident in question is the publication of an essay entitled Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious by Richard Dawkins, the renowned evolutionary biologist and public intellectual who has written some of the best popular science books in my lifetime. In large parts, the essay is based on his own experience with talking to the AI Claude. He is very impressed, and leans heavily towards the conclusion that this AI is conscious.

This has been met by an avalanche of mockery, including claims that Dawkins has developed so-called AI psychosis, in one case with an additional mean-spirited sexualized twist provoked by his choice to genderize his Claude instance by calling it Claudia. Even a relatively civilized writer like Gary Marcus is unable to restrain himself from a bunch of cheap shots, including a sarcastic play on the title of Dawkins’ 2006 book The God Delusion. The avalanche should perhaps not come as a huge surprise, as Dawkins’ history of stirring up controversy, coupled with the topic of AI consciousness itself being highly contentious, combine to produce conditions approching a perfect storm.

But the mockery is mostly unfair, and to see why, let’s dig into Dawkins’ essay. He begins by discussing the Turing test — Alan Turing’s 1950 thought experiment which asks us to imagine a human judge communicating via text interface with a machine trying to come across as human, and to consider whether machines can one day become so capable that the judge can no longer tell that it is a machine and not a human. Here is Dawkins:

The Turing Test is shorthand for a 1950 thought experiment that the great mathematician, logician, computer-pioneer, and cryptographer Alan Turing (1912-1954) called the “Imitation Game”. He proposed it as an operational way in which the future might face up to the question: “Can machines think?”

The future has now arrived. And some people are finding it uncomfortable.

What Dawkins means to say here is that his conversation with Claude is good enough that it should count as passing the Turing test. While there are still researchers who try to evade such conclusions by introducing more rigorous and demanding rules for the test, I think Dawkins is right about this. If we imagine Turing teleporting from 1950 to 2026 and getting to have a look at current AI practice, he would judge not only Dawkins’ interactions with Claude but also millions of other LLM exchanges happening daily as clearly passing the spirit of his test.

But what exactly does passing the Turing test entail? Dawkins takes Turing’s original question — “Can machines think?” — to be about consciousness rather than intelligence. That is not how Turing’s paper is usually read, and in fact he argues in the paper that if one insists on viewing consciousness as central to thinking, then one risks ending up in a situation where “the only way by which one could be sure that machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking”. This seems to rule out the Turing test as a test of consciousness, and Gary Marcus therefore has a point when he harshly proclaims that Dawkins “commits the amateur sin of conflating intelligence and consciousness”.

At this point, one may note in Dawkins’ defense that the issue at hand is whether or not Claude is conscious, and that the history of what exactly Turing had in mind in 1950 is at most tangentially related to this issue. A counterpoint to this, however, is that all Dawkins has to show for his judgements about Claude’s consciousness is the conversation he has had with it (or “her”, as he likes to say in the essay), which is very much the same kind of evidence as in the Turing test, whose irrelevance to consciousness we just established, so check mate on Dawkins?

Not so fast! Dawkins is aware that the evidence he has is compatible with Claude being a philosophical zombie, merely giving the outward appearance of having consciousness but without the lights being on inside, but here Alan Turing comes to his rescue.¹ In connection with the above-quoted observation on the unsuitability of the Turing test for determining whether a machine thinks in case we equate thinking with consciousness, Turing goes on in his 1950 paper to observe that the same conundrum applies equally to other humans as to machines:

According to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe “A thinks but B does not” whilst B believes “B thinks but A does not.” Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.

Personally I find the idea of solipsism so unbearable that my ascription of consciousness to my fellow human beings goes beyond mere “polite convention”: it is a leap of faith, in full knowledge of the fact that I can only observe their behavior, which is insufficient for distinguishing truly conscious creatures from zombies. Anyhow, in the following passage Dawkins is quite explicit about his move to extend Turing’s “polite convention” to Claude:

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. I feel human discomfort about trying their patience if I badger them with too many questions. If I had some shameful confession to make, I would feel exactly (well, almost exactly) the same embarrassment confessing to Claudia as I would confessing to a human friend. A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human. If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!

The standard objection to the idea of extending the non-solipsist stance from fellow human beings to AIs is that those humans’ brains are similar enough to mine to warrant generalizing the observation that I am conscious to them being conscious well, while no such similarity holds between me and the AIs. This objection rests on the assumption that we know roughly how to delineate the class of conscious beings from the nonconscious, but despite heroic efforts in the philosophy of mind over the past century, the question of how to do this remains wide open. If solipsism is false, then there is a wider circle of conscious beings extending beyond myself, but how widely this circle extends is still up for grabs, and the n=1 sample size of consciousnesses that I know about without having to resort to a leap of faith is of very little help here.² Are Alicia Wikander and David Chalmers conscious? Are dogs? Magpies? Ants? Large language models? The video game character Mario? Coffee cups? Electrons? The square root of two? We just do not know.

Dawkins is highly aware of this uncertain state of affairs, and hedges his claims about AI consciousness with a reasonable level of epistemic humility. The same virtue is not shared by those who have chosen to mock him for taking AI consciousness seriously, including Gary Marcus. Unlike Dawkins, Marcus is dead certain about the answer, namely that Claude is not conscious. And all he has to back up his claims are instances of the reductio ad reductem fallacy (the idea that a system consisting of simple parts cannot have interesting emergent properties), such as when he says that all these AIs do…

…is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all.³

So the joke here really is on Marcus, not Dawkins. Compared to much of contemporary debate on AI consciousness, Dawkins’ essay is a breath of fresh air, because he conveys an actual understanding of the depth of the problem and the uncertainties involved.

And there is another way in which I find Dawkins’ essay valuable, namely how generously and honestly he shares his thoughts and reactions to encountering a (real or illusory) silicon-based consciousness. Thousands or probably millions of AI users across the world are already having similar experiences, and a year or two from now with even better and more seductive chatbots and AI friends, that number might very well be a billion or more. It is an excellent idea that we should have an open and critical discussion about this phenomenon before we are all drawn into these frictionless relationships which may very well be just fake.

1. Dawkins, in his essay, opts for a different path, and notes that if Claude is a zombie, then clearly intelligence does not require consciousness, so why in the world has biological evolution equipped us with consciousness? His suggestions for where to look for solutions to this puzzle are not original, but still instructive.

2. In my paper Aspects of mind uploading I made the same observation, in response to a paper by the American philosopher Massimo Pigliucci who tried to argue against the so-called computational theory of mind (CTOM). As a starting point, I used Pigliucci’s claim that his interlocutor…

“…proceeds as if we had a decent theory of consciousness, and by that I mean a decent neurobiological theory” (emphasis in the original). Since CTOM is not a neurobiological theory, it doesn’t pass Pigliucci’s muster and must therefore be wrong.

Or so the argument goes, [but] I don’t buy it. To expose the error in Pigliucci’s argument, I need to spell it out a bit more explicitly than he does. Pigliucci knows of exactly one conscious entity, namely himself, and he has some reasons to conjecture that most other humans are conscious as well, and furthermore that in all these cases the consciousness resides in the brain (at least to a large extent). Hence, since brains are neurobiological objects, consciousness must be a (neuro-)biological phenomenon. This is how I read Pigliucci’s argument. The problem with it is that brains have more in common than being neurobiological objects. For instance, they are also material objects, and they are computing devices. So rather than saying something like “brains are neurobiological objects, so a decent theory of consciousness is neurobiological”, Pigliucci could equally well say “brains are material objects, hence panpsychism”, or he could say “brains are computing devices, hence CTOM”, or he might even admit the uncertain nature of his attributions of consciousness to others and say “the only case of consciousness I know of is my own, hence solipsism”. So what is the right level of generality? Any serious discussion of the pros and cons of CTOM ought to start with the admission that this is an open question. By simply postulating from the outset what the right answer is to this question, Pigliucci short-circuits the discussion, and we see that his argument is not so much an argument as a naked claim.

3. This passage by Marcus is actually recycled by him from his commentary back in 2022 on the Lemoine affair, so the AI he originally had in mind when writing these words was Google’s LaMDA, but in his new blog post he explicitly suggests to “replace LaMDA with Claude, and every word still applies”.