Dawkins should stick to pop-biology, and we should be more demanding before granting someone a title of public intellectual.
But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.
I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.
Unless someone was educated in philosophy of religion, for example.
> and his books were very popular.
Hard to deny. I have a beef with pop-science in general, but nothing particularly bad about his books on evolution.
> But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.
My comment is not exhibit - I poured crap on him more than even 10 years ago, when he was one of the Four Horsemen (and I poured crap on other three as well), and generally celebrated.
I was there before it was fashionable.
> I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.
Couldn't care less about trans movement or Dawkins opinion on gender issues.
Can't blame a guy for branching out.
Re: Re: Ex Machina movie.
Do you think being alive is necessarily, rather than merely historically, required for consciousness?
I don't buy into any strong claim about consciousness at the present time, because humanity doesn't seem to have any test that an outside observer can apply; this means that at the moment only a consciousness itself can know that it is conscious, while everyone else has to assume or not based on mere correspondences such as "alive" (which excludes computers) or "talks to me" (which recorded messages have done since the wax cylinder), leaving us to argue about if PETA are liberators or nuts well before "Attention Is All You Need" was a sparkle in Google's eye.
Ah, I suppose I don't. My comment was poorly worded. However I feel confident that consciousness does not exist anywhere near the current level of fancy linear algebra and statistics that make LLMs work.
Dawkins is an IDW-tier ‘intellectual’. He’s what an intelligent person looks like to an imbecile.
Now he’s positive that an AI chatbot is ‘conscious’ whereas here is what he said about animals…
“It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.”
Animals: ‘Likely… Probably’.
AI chatbot that liked his unpublished book: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.
Amazing.
>Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal (1989), the Finlay Innovation Award (1990), the Michael Faraday Award (1990), the Nakayama Prize (1994), the fifth International Cosmos Prize (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001), the 2001 and 2012 Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002)...
> honorary doctorates University of Huddersfield, University of Westminster, Durham University, the University of Hull, the University of Antwerp, the University of Oslo, the University of Aberdeen, Open University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the University of Valencia...
PhD, professorship at Oxford
How's Rogan et al doing there?
In the same way, seeing an incompetent stage magician fumble before you see a very talented one perform flawlessly will help you understand that it's all sleight of hand. If you jump right to a professional performance, you might think it's real magic.
