Dawkins, the Turing test, and the orchid: is anyone home?
Richard Dawkins spent May prodding at machine consciousness, and someone built a rebuttal. In a conversation with ChatGPT he admits he intellectually believes it isn't conscious but emotionally feels that it is — enough to counsel ethical caution. In UnHerd he pushes harder: if today's LLMs pass the Turing test yet aren't conscious, then consciousness may serve no evolutionary purpose — a byproduct, or simply one route to competence among several. Steven Hao's reply, dearricharddawkins.com, argues Dawkins mistook sophisticated mimicry for the real thing: RLHF optimises a model to sound conscious because human raters reward it, much as natural selection shaped orchids to mimic female wasps without the orchid ever feeling a thing.
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