As artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Claude are becoming more integrated into many people’s lives, it’s perfectly natural to wonder why and how these things work and what possible implications they have for philosophy.
The current AI systems are not conscious, but unfortunately, a lot of people are becoming enamored with the idea that they might be, including Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, who actually wrote an entire book, which he seems to have forgotten about called The God Delusion, which argued that minds aren’t necessary to produce perceived order or intentional behavior.
But instead of taking his own advice, Dawkins has spent the past several weeks writing embarrassing essays and almost love letters to his AI agent, which he named “Claudia.”
I’ve already dealt with Dawkins’s specific behavior in a previous column, but he is far from alone in thinking that these things might be conscious.
And since that’s the case, my friend Virginia Heffernan of Magic and Loss and I decided to dig in further into why large language models are not full minds using some of the tools in the new philosophical and scientific framework that I’m developing called the Epistemic Flux Theory. As we often do in our recordings, however, we packed in a lot of other subject material into the discussion.
This episode is on the longer side, but it’s also filled with asides and tangents that I hope can make the science and philosophy understandable and relevant to everyday life. I hope you’ll enjoy.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Richard Dawkins thinks a chatbot is his special friend
10:45 — An introduction to Epistemic Flux Theory
18:16 — Consciousness is mental autonomy, not the ability to have experience
28:39 — Extrinsic thinking requires a body, memetic thinking does not
39:56 — Is AI sycophancy what people want, even though they won’t admit it?
55:40 — Embodied robotics as a better machine intelligence
01:06:16 — Cognition as deciphering relationalities
01:15:50 — What Alan Turing actually was trying to test
01:26:48 — AI as authoritarian fantasy, an the problem with computational functionalism
01:35:24 — How imperfect chatbots and robots reveal human cruelty
01:42:24 — How much human cultural output was already synthetic before the AI revolution?
01:45:34 — Cognition is individuated, but epistemology is necessarily communal
01:53:17 — Philosophy and religion must accept that science is best able to answer certain questions
02:01:21 — Substance as an illusion of processes
02:05:43 — Liberalism must reinvent itself in order to thrive in this future
About the Show
Theory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.
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