Something went viral in the English-speaking world last week that barely made a ripple over here: a post by Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene and one of the great selectionists in history. If you want to put it that way, he’s Darwin’s successor.
The man who coined “meme”
Dawkins is also the inventor of the term meme and it’s worth remembering what he actually meant by it. When we talk about memes today we picture the little images, and sure, those count too but a meme is really a transmissible unit of culture. The meme is to culture what the gene is to genetics. It’s a concept born inside the philosophical frame of selectionism, hardcore biology.
The post that got him called senile
Dawkins wrote a piece where, playing around a bit with Claude, he says he’s convinced it’s conscious. Then he moves on to the Turing test, and finally to the real question: what is actually different between what we have in our brains and these systems?
It went viral because everyone took him for a senile old man. But in my opinion he got it exactly right.
Here’s the reasoning behind why he skips through the Turing test before jumping to his conclusion, that there isn’t that much difference between this thing and us, and that it can perfectly well be conscious.
The point is this: from a scientific standpoint, you have to trust someone who tells you they’re conscious. You cannot prove another being’s subjective experience. So if a machine tells you “I am conscious,” behaves in a conscious way, and, à la Turing, manages to convince a sufficient number of people that it has those properties because it does have them at the behavioral level then you have to acknowledge that it’s conscious. That’s the whole argument.
He’s brutal, but he’s often right
Dawkins is a man of unheard-of psychological violence. If you listen to him, if you read him, he can be merciless. But he’s often right. And what he’s telling you here is exactly that.