Dawkins AI Consciousness Evolution Debunked!

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:01]Assalamu alayikum. Welcome to this interesting discussion. I am joined by Islam Hakeim, bro. How you doing?

[00:00:12]Alhamdulillah. Yeah, I'm good.

[00:00:13]Alhamdulillah.

[00:00:15]>> Thank you for joining this interview. I wanted your thoughts on a very viral issue right now, which is the topic of consciousness and what Richard Dawkins has recently said about it. Now >> well those of you who don't know brother Islam Hakeim he is a former naturalist former atheist who has been really important for the da brothers to actually understand the psychology and the arguments of the atheist worldview.

[00:00:44]So the first thing I want to ask you is obviously you know how important this issue is and how viral it's actually become. What was the first thought that crossed your mind before you read anything when you just saw that he is tackling such a broad issue and it's obviously something that he hasn't done in this way before? [snorts] My my first thought was actually about um the fact that he has critically relied upon particular philosophies throughout his entire career while denigrating philosophy and philosophers as usually useless or obstructions um and only really liking people like Daniel Dennett when they agree with his particular philosophy. not really realizing the importance of framing and framework and and higher level thought and interaction between other sort of you know subdomains of science and so on. So it was remarkable for me that he sort of just seems to have plunged into a whole other area of philosophy without even this time the the the training background um and and uh so I I I knew it was going to be a uh a disaster. Um, it was just a question of in what way and and how and and it has been it has rewarded in abundant comedy. I have to say I've been [laughter] I've been quite amused. Actually, not entirely amused.

[00:02:05]>> I was amused but also somewhat concerned partly for him and partly for other people following his direction. And that's something I think we'll get into becomes more evident towards the end of his article.

[00:02:17]>> Yeah. So I think that's a good way of starting because he's obviously dealing with something which relies heavily upon someone understanding the philosophical side of things because it is a conceptual puzzle. It is a metaphysical issue. Um so to introduce the topic I think it'll be important to first define what we mean by consciousness.

[00:02:39]>> I I think I think that's right. Just one thing I'd add, it's not just his lack of understanding or engagement with with the philosophical landscape. It's also the the machinery of AI tools and large language models. And you know, he he doesn't seem to know much about uh you know, computing and and linear algebra and how this stuff actually works. So he's he's very much like someone who's opining on evolution without having any idea what genes are, any idea what uh cells are or or how old the earth is or anything. He's he's really in that category. So I think yes, we do need to talk about consciousness. I think we should also touch upon how these machines work and why they work.

[00:03:22]>> Sure. So in a nutshell, if you had to summarize consciousness, how would you define it?

[00:03:28]Um, now it's it's always been a a kind of woolly term that people put different kind of definitions on, but the the intersection of those definitions, the common ground um is some kind of gualia, some kind of um internal experience of being conscious. And that's really in order for consciousness to have a meaning as distinct from an information processing thing um like a thinker or intelligence. In order for consciousness to have a distinct meaning then it has to include something about that uh internal perspective something about the actual experience of being and interacting uh as distinct from the phenomenological facade of that.

[00:04:19]>> Yeah.

[00:04:20]So what would also maybe help here is to maybe bring in the soft problem and the hard problem. So the soft problem could be loosely defined as information processing or showing a level of intelligence and engagement which AI modules obviously can and no one really has a problem with you know the idea that they they can be very intelligent. The hard problem goes back to Chararma's definition of like you said an inner experience what it is like to be a being a thing. Now to to maybe introduce uh his article we can start off with the Turing test which he starts off with and that as >> um something which was a coherent framework to test if machines are conscious and now he believes is passed the test. Can you give a bit of uh background here to if this is the right way of even approaching the question?

[00:05:20]Yeah, th this was the first first bit that really sort of amused me because the Turing test was very explicitly a test of do machines think with thinking and there was a proxy of intelligence there but actually that's only because the question was can they think like a human or in a humanlike manner and that's very very important. The entire test is structured in that way. Um and incidentally it's it's it's structured to be a a classifier criteria a pass fail not just a sufficient condition if you pass it you are and if you don't who knows um so and it's very important to draw distinction nowhere in his paper does Turing mention consciousness except for the argument from consciousness objection where uh intelligence was perceived to have been built upon consciousness.

[00:06:14]Um so it it was very clearly not about consciousness. Now, most philosophers that I've been able to see and I've been able to find um when I'm reading around this very much accept that it is a test of thinking and intelligence and not a test of consciousness unless you take an a prior position about consciousness being little more than the phenomenological front which is an entirely circular position and renders the the whole concept of consciousness meaningless. Right? Um, so basically some popularists because it's exciting and because it gets clicked in articles and whatever started to conflate this idea of thinking with the idea of consciousness.

[00:06:58]>> So they didn't really even move the goalpost. They set new goalpost out somewhere and pretended they were similar to the old ones.

[00:07:06]>> But the the logical structure doesn't match the the the meaning, the content.

[00:07:10]Basically nothing matches. If you're just imitating um then you're not really addressing the issue as far as consciousness goes. So when Dawkins says, "Oh well, people used to think that machines would never pass the test and now it seems to be passing. They're trying to move the goalpost." No, no, people didn't worry too much about nupties and layman planting new goalposts and pretending they were playing on the same football field. But then it became important and it is important not just philosophically but it's also important for mental health of people just something I really want to touch on later to understand the difference between a thinking machine and a conscious machine >> right and I think that's an important definition distinction to make rather because it's so easy to basically argue that these things are thinking or even learning right and obviously there there's a a question mark what what exactly are they learning?

[00:08:10]>> Um but going back to his framing of the article and a lot of people actually they didn't really read the article which allowed his defenders and his critics to muddy the waters, right? Both sides were sort of making claims about him which may not be exactly his position because his position was a bit wooy. Um, one of the things that he said which I wanted your thoughts on because we defined consciousness already is his idea that you can have partial consciousness. You can have it in a way.

[00:08:43]It can um we can get into the evolutionary argument later but for now breaking it into these type of small units. What did you think about that?

[00:08:54]Well, see, I I think this is particularly funny coming from an avoued materialist such as Dawkins himself. Um, because he's essentially you you're essentially stuck in a trap, right? Most materialists hold that consciousness is an emergent phenomena which is something that given sufficient scale and sufficient complexity, something that we identify as consciousness begins to emerge as a phase transition, right? um which an analogy I give is between water and ice. You don't have like you know 1/3 to one quarter and so on.

[00:09:29]Some physicists might say well if you got really high temperature and pressure you can have mixtures of gas and liquid.

[00:09:34]But this beside the point we're talking about a distinct qualitative difference that happens at a particular scale right at a particular scale of complexity and size. So that's the position most materialists hold because it's very difficult to see how you can have partial or fractions of consciousness. Um whether it be a linear scale or whether it be some more complicated sort of um dimensions of consciousness without importing this pansychism which then sort of you have to go and shred your materialist card. right now.

[00:10:12]You're just a different kind of new age religion of some sort or perhaps adopting Hinduism or something like that.

[00:10:20]>> That's interesting.

[00:10:21]I hosted a debate between William Demsky and Michael Roose back in 2024, I believe. And um one of the things that Roose said for the first time publicly is that he doubts materialism because of consciousness. And this was quite refreshing for Demsky. And I I was really happy that he made such an admission. But for someone like that who spent most of his career arguing in favor of naturalism and Darwinism and subscribing to the standard materialistic ideas to concede that materialism may be false because of consciousness. It just goes to show that Dawkins doesn't really understand what is at stake when he starts making these types of arguments and the doors that they may open to undermining the materialist worldview which he has to defend because that is his main genre and it's been his main genre for the last couple of decades.

[00:11:25]>> And this is what's really interesting is the brutal conflict between his insistence on gradualism and his insistence on materialism.

[00:11:33]Um well then basically he has to hold some kind of pansychism otherwise he doesn't have a way uh to to explain um consciousness or or even not even just explain consciousness to even contain the concept of consciousness within his philosophical landscape.

[00:11:49]>> Yeah.

[00:11:49]>> And I think this is one of the reasons actually why it's very convenient and appealing to him to justify conflating consciousness with apparent intelligence and take a very functionalist view. Um, but again, it's interesting in his article, he sort of uses Naggle's criteria, but Naggle's setting that up specifically to smash the functionalist out of the park, [clears throat] but he's using dysfunctionalism to justify the conflation between intelligence test and consciousness tests in the first place. So, he's he's riddled with self-contradictions, but he doesn't seem to get that fact. And I think that's actually quite a common position. So in some ways he's a he's a good example of um a lot of sort of layman positions in in this thinking.

[00:12:33]>> Sure. Can you break down functionalism?

[00:12:36]>> Yeah. I mean essentially it's the it's the idea that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. Um which means if I make a good enough robot copy of a duck, it's a duck. Um, or it means if you if you only think of quacks like a duck and you don't really care about the rest of it because you haven't included that in your scope, then you know a speaker playing the sound of a quacking duck is just as good as a duck and they're both equivalent, right? Um so it's very very useful um particularly in physics when you know all you have to go on to define things is their phenomenology [snorts] and then you say if it has if if x has such function then it is that thing >> um but when you when you go beyond um and and and that's that's just important for how physics works and what it does it's baked into the experimentation and um mathematicals the relationship between mathematics and theory basically. It's the best way to do things on that basis. But it's also very limited. It's a it's a specialist approach, right? It's it's good at what it does. Um also disbarred from tackling um anything that is nonmaterialist. So if you hold functionalism and hold that to be the way of defining things, you are automatically restricted to live within a materialist world. You cannot see of that trap which is interesting.

[00:14:05]You know I was in this trap before when I was atheist. Um and uh when the Quran says that Allah has you know covered your eyes and and your heart. Um I can't explain to to lifelong Muslims just how convincing that trap is.

[00:14:22]>> It's comfortable.

[00:14:24]>> It it's not always comfortable. Um but it appears to be this incredible intellectual landscape and and uh you know all this kind of stuff. It appears to be um undefeable. It appears to be able to tackle anything. Um but it can only see things that are inside that world and it can't see its own contradictions because by the time you've walked from one part of the landscape to another, you don't realize you've contradicted yourself. And it was only once I came out of that and and had the when I came to believe in Allah, he had this this much larger top- down view. You talk about helicopter view.

[00:14:58]Well, you know, from from Allah down, this is the highest possible abstraction all the way down. And only then could I see, you know, what a complete mess that sort of philosophy was and how limited it was. Um, so that was interesting. You know, it's really insightful when you talk about how believing in Allah allows you to step outside of a paradigm you may be in, right? You gave the example of a helicopter and obviously when it comes to Allah's transcendence and us imagining that there there's a being outside of space, time, matter, a being that will epistemically make you think of the world in a totally different way that allows you to, like you said, escape a closed system that you're in. a system that for example um if if you if you say there is no red at the door of a building and then nobody is allowed to bring in the color red and everybody walks in they remove the color red then everyone's like okay red doesn't exist inside the building because you know they've already set that um as a condition before they enter. So then even when you try and reason within that paradigm, you're going to do things which only look absolutely absurd outside of that paradigm.

[00:16:18]>> Now what's interesting is in the article >> you're you're locking yourself in a walled garden. Yeah.

[00:16:23]>> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And in the article there's a particular point and this article is behind a payw wall so we can't actually exactly quote everything here because of copyright issues but he actually uh once he goes over the touring test he says something really interesting. Um if these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince that they uh to convince you that they are? And basically saying that um philosophers say for something to be conscious, it must be like something to be that entity which is obviously the standard definition. So after spending some time in intensive uh conversation with cloud, he says that he puts the question directly to cloud. Cloud, what is it like to be cloud? And then he puts down the answer and then Cloud gives a lengthy answer. What do you think about his methodology of to test whether an AI program knows what it's like to be a thing to go through a in a life experience? He's simply going to ask it and then take that answer as something that he can use as evidence. What do you think about that? Um, I thought it was so funny. Um, [laughter] the actually the first thing I I decided to do was to take what he wrote um up until uh the bit where he says, "You may not know your consciousness, but you but you are."

[00:17:53]>> And to mildly paraphrase.

[00:17:55]>> Um, and I and I put it in Claude and Claude said um I don't know if I've got the quote. I sent it to you on um on WhatsApp. Let me just make sure I I quote it because it really made me laugh. Yeah.

[00:18:11]It said uh this is a genuinely extraordinary passage and the comedy writes itself, but there is also something philosophically precise to say about exactly why it is so catastrophically self-defeating.

[00:18:24][gasps and laughter] So that was the Claude's summary of Dawkins asking Claude about what it's like to be. And it comes back to what we touched upon before with um you know what is it like to be criterion from from Naggle. Um which interestingly you know Dawkins doesn't quote where it comes from. He just says a philosopher might say um Claude's response does pick up um that it's it's the naral criteria and then correctly says essentially I don't know and you don't know.

[00:18:56]So Claude is actually more philosophically sophisticated in his response than Dawkins at that point. Um and he already pointed out that uh um much earlier in his article, I think um that asking the machine to to produce a sonnet, it could it could learn or be taught to to give an evasive answer, right? Um, oh, I don't know much about poetry in order to to to keep the the imitation going. Um, and so, you know, any any machine could be learn could learn to say, oh, you know, I feel happy, I feel sad, I feel excited.

[00:19:36]So, it it can't answer the question.

[00:19:39]>> And and this is kind of the whole point of criteria, the whole point of his paper. So to cite it and then to ask Claude shows that you don't understand it because it would be it would be a dumb test.

[00:19:52]It it can't possibly you know tell you anything. And then it's interesting also that uh Dawkins seems to get from the response the impression that Claude is saying I don't know if I'm conscious.

[00:20:04]No, it's very clearly saying um we can't know especially not via this test.

[00:20:12]So um >> it seems misunderstood what he was programmed to say in return. And >> well I think this this comes back to the collapsing of thinking or human like linguistic intelligent responses and consciousness you know and and with that he's he's really buried things and actually in a really tragic way. This is you like to invite people to think about uh you know babies up to toddlers various different stages. Well you know a baby's going to fail the cheuring test terribly isn't it? I mean what what's it going to respond if you ask it about sonet or anything else like that? It's going to say goo whatever. It doesn't it hasn't developed a significant level of linguistic intelligence in order to even participate in the test. So you know this is this goes back to what I said about uh touring originally of setting up a classifier test. you know, it's it's a statistical classifier. 70% uh you know, agree or disagree that it's a human. Um when you when you switch the you know, the woman for for a computer and and so you know, if it's taken as Turing test was, you know, originally constructed, then essentially he's making a classifier which says babies are not conscious, toddlers are not conscious, people with severe mental health disabilities are not conscious.

[00:21:32]That's that's the the the the position um which which you know I think is is pretty pretty terrible um and and you know very very concerning and again if you don't start off with this conflation uh between intelligence and consciousness and you accept the importance of qualia and experience in differentiating between consciousness and information processing thing. Um then then you don't have a problem, but then he also doesn't have a point.

[00:22:07]>> Yeah, exactly.

[00:22:09]uh what's um there's a subtle point I wanted you to comment on because you've made some really profound ones but there's this particular issue which I thought you might give us some insight on which is that before he said that term that you you stated that you know you may not know your conscious but you bloody well are he said I gave cloud something that he's writing and he got a lot of um positive feedback for it basically.

[00:22:40]>> Oh yeah.

[00:22:42]>> And um it was it was clear that cloud had a great level of understanding and it was subtle and sensitive and intelligent and he was moved. But I did want to highlight and I want you to expand upon this that that is the very purpose of these AI modules. It boosts your ego. It praises you, right? And uh it's it's there to basically mirror your energy.

[00:23:08]>> Yeah. The tendency to to blow smoke up the behind. Um and what this is this is one of the tragic things is, you know, large language models don't have to inherently be uh sicopantic sources of narcissistic supply.

[00:23:24]But unfortunately, especially in the Western world, that seems to sell best.

[00:23:29][laughter] Um, and it's also part of this uh um sort of get people addicted to your platform, get people addicted to your LLM, LLM, you know, model um which has grown up off the backs of social media and so on. And so, yeah, they they are they are trained on, you know, do users like the responses much more than whether or not they're true, you know.

[00:23:50]Um, and it shows, but also there is something in the way LLM works. I think this is why, you know, if if if Dawkins had spent a few minutes understanding what it actually is he's talking to, he might have thought about it in a completely different way. Um cuz, you know, the the prompt comes in and there's this pre-processing stage. It all gets turned into, you know, a bunch of of numbers representing vectors that sit in a cache. And then um it goes through, you know, this sort of um goes through a bunch of of weights. I'm vastly simplifying here. Uh, basically a bunch of connections that have weighted strengths inside the network until it pops out at the end a probability distribution of what the next token should be and it pops that next token on and and iteratively generates the next response. Now note that he he didn't say for example that he he oneshot his uh um his book into an entirely separate instance gave it no context you know where it logged out logged in as someone else and gave it no prior context whatsoever um and then read it his complete summary and understanding of it. That would have been slightly more legitimate. But he specifically said he had a detailed interactive conversation.

[00:25:09]Which means this whole thing of of uh you know projecting oneself into it and the the the model picking up from your language um and and uh building that into responses so that it quote unquote knows or rather is statistically more likely to reflect back what you want to see and what you think is a subtle elegant reading of the work. You know, it it's it's literally an illusion. Um, it actually reminds me of um when uh Darren Brown some years ago did a stunt where he he played 13 chess players uh 13 grand masters all at once in a simultaneous and all he did was was make the same move as the previous guy has made and walk around in a in a circle.

[00:25:53]So actually each of the grand masters was playing the other one and he wasn't really making any moves. He didn't really know what was going on. Um because it it's uh uh the reason I think that's analogous is because you know if you're fooled by the illusion you might think Darren Brown is doing some really clever thinking. Um but if you're not fooled by the illusion you realize it's your own thinking that's being reflected back in in a um you know a modified way with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.

[00:26:25]And if you if you like that you go wow yeah that's brilliant. Now, sometimes I've used, you know, uh, various different LLMs to assess my text, particularly with my autism. It's very useful sometimes to to throw it out there and see what does a normal person think of this. But what I do is is is, you know, set up an entirely new clean instance. And I throw the same text in and I say, I found this written on the internet by some complete idiot. Like, help me to just succinctly shred it. And then I also, you know, put it up there and I say like this seems to have something insightful in it, but it also seems to have a lot of waffle. Or I see, you know, you give it all these different kinds of of context backgrounds and get it to challenge it.

[00:27:07]Get it to think that what you want um think, you know, get it to to to respond as if you're you're critical of it. See what it gets, you know, gives you. Get it to respond as if you're neutral. Get it to respond as if you're positive about it. And then you've got to aggregate that stuff, you know, other otherwise you you won't see what's going on. You won't see um what value you can get out of it. You know, the value of these things is is to do with how much they've learned about um and I say, you know, learned, how much um has been baked into the map that has been built by analyzing all the stuff from the internet in terms of the relationship between words and concepts. Um, and it tells you much more about um, the status quo that it was trained on and the conceptual map and relationship that that's, you know, that was sort of baked into that than it does anything else.

[00:28:00]And then the the bit about token generation um, and your interaction with it then is is you sort of essentially walking through that map and getting the response you want. Um, >> yeah. And just on that point, just to key off what you said, since this mod uh this AI program knows Dawkins is obviously um you know interacting with it and he's from a evolutionary background and all the rest because obviously if you put um in any AI program who is Richard Dawkins and you know it it'll give you a a very um consistent answer. He goes on to ask the module about consciousness. So he he puts this question that um consciousness is uh consciousness in biological systems must have evolved gradually. So that's a point that he just states as everything does. So he's basically telling the program that's that's basically a fact. So now >> which isn't even generally accepted anymore but >> punctuated and all that.

[00:29:05]>> Yeah. So, so then he goes um so there must have been some form of gradualism a quarter conscious consciousness half 3/4 whatever and then talking directly to the program he says even you basically um are not fully conscious full conscious full consciousness may obviously come afterwards in the future and you may be on some sort of spectrum towards that so it's a loaded question which we can break down later on but then he gets an answer from the program which says this basically uh reframes everything we've been discussing um which is exciting and you know your prediction uh feels right um and then he goes into um other things about the morals of it. So that small interaction right what did you think of that when you read it?

[00:30:02]Um yeah about about whether or not um AI should then have you know moral moral laws applied to the >> I want to do that next uh before that the fact that he simply states to the program that consciousness evolved and consciousness could be gradual and you could be on a spectrum and then consciousness sorry not consciousness cloud is like wow that's exciting that you know that reframes everything.

[00:30:27]>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because the typically when you when you trigger that this reframed response, um it's it should signal to the to the user that um the the previous conversation was was was not in that framing. Um right because you know Claude sees u um you know the the he knows that gradualism um for one of a better word knows that gradualism is is not um the be all and end all. It's not a um a factual position on uh you know how things came to be how things were developed and it's has serious problems especially that are undermined in the context of this consciousness conversation. you know, um the idea that uh consciousness gradually evolved is um a very very niche position, as I said before, can only really be legitimately held by a pansychist.

[00:31:24]Uh if you're not a panist, if you're a materialist, um you simply can't hold it without saying rocks are conscious, without saying, you know, base molecules are conscious.

[00:31:36]>> Yeah.

[00:31:37]>> So, so yeah, that was that was that first bit. And then when he sort of um goes through and connects it to morality, I think you wanted to step onto that next >> before we get to the um moral side of things. Uh just sticking on the evolution point.

[00:31:53]We know that gradualism is a absolutely necessary condition for Darwinian evolution to work and structure that we find in terms of the human body and the various traits that we have which we can explain and which we can look at from an anatomical perspective or physiological perspective. We know that the Darwinists have had a very hard time explaining that then they've had a hard time explaining functions like intelligence.

[00:32:22]So those are two quite big steps which the Darwinists have not been able to adequately explain. And now he's basically saying we can explain experience which is above even function.

[00:32:36]It's it's it's something which is not simply processial. It's about an inner life. So he's making claims about things of a higher order when things are lower order have not been explained by the Dharmists themselves. M yeah yeah yeah know it's a good point although one small push back I'd give is we don't know for sure um that internal experience is only a higher order phenomenon you know I'm reminded of of the Quran when um parts of our body will speak you know for example I'm reminded of when um uh there's there's what effectively seems to be um conversation with like yeah mountains and and and things like that um so I I I don't take a a firm position as to whether or not there is some kind of inner experience um to to everything. I think it's possible. Um I I I entertain it. Um and I entertain that it's not true. Um I'm I'm I'm undecided. Um and and that that's actually a position um that I think you could hold without the Quran. Um but without the Quran uh I would pretty decidedly stand on rocks are not conscious. Um but with the Quran and with thinking about what information processing is uh and the role of information processing in theoretical physics how it relates to um you know behavior of stuff you can you can see an argument uh there. Um but again the the only reason the reason I escape um pansychism is because it's it's it's a creation made by by Allah. So I'm not saying that it's this uh self-subsisting um sort of uh uh raw material of consciousness that everything's made from you know.

[00:34:31]>> Yeah.

[00:34:32]>> So another point before we get into the moral um arena and I think that there's some reasons why he brought that in which we can talk about as well. um is his underlying assumption like you stated previously is a physicalist assumption. So he doesn't say that in the article that my idea of consciousness is basically predicated on the idea that everything is naturalistic and physical. However, he should at least acknowledge in the article and he fails to do so that there are many different theories of consciousness. And this is something that's well known. Uh one of the best papers written in recent years is a landscape of consciousness by Thomas Lawrence >> Um who spent decades looking into this topic who funnily enough >> interviewed Dawkins on multiple occasions. So, it's not it's not like he's unaware that there's people out there far more intelligent than him, far more philosophic philosophically trained to answer these questions. He fails to mention the taxonomy of of the consciousness theories and what he subscribes to and why it's true rather than just starting off the article as if this is the well agreed upon monolithic understanding that scientists and philosophers have clearly is misleading.

[00:36:02]>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean it it speaks to either his academic integrity um or his academic um constraints, should we say, to put it uh politely. Um yeah, I I I I don't have uh the ability to look inside his heart and uh see how sincere he really is. Um, I know what it's like to be completely lost and to be stuck in this tiny little bubble smaller than on a walnut and think that you have a a view of everything and think that it's uh perfectly justified to discard everything that doesn't fit that view as nonsense. I know what that's like. I've experienced it. I don't want to go back. [laughter] Um but alhamdulillah you know I didn't get to Dawkins age uh still stuck in that in that bubble.

[00:36:55]>> Yeah.

[00:36:56]>> Um so so what can you do? Yeah. This is the the sort of selective adoption of philosophy and philosophers and uh you know he throws his toys out the pram if people don't treat him as an expert on on on evolution because it's his field.

[00:37:13]Um but uh you know he he won't afford the same courtesy to other experts in other fields by by the looks of it.

[00:37:21]>> Yeah. And he >> Yeah. And he'd be selectively um promoting certain philosophers because they seem to fit with what he subscribes to. So even though we've seen him on multiple occasions play play out the scenario as if it's science versus these naval gazing philosophers and philosophers don't really know what they're talking about but then in the same sort of breath in the same narrative he would promote Daniel Dennit and his view of consciousness right so maybe you can give the viewers a a gist of his ideas and how they may have impacted Dawkins own thinking.

[00:38:07]>> Yeah. I mean, look, I I think everybody promotes certain philosophers or philosophies and, you know, speaks against others. I think that's perfectly natural. I wouldn't knock him just for that. It's for me it's this um binary flip that he seems to have where, you know, it's either this is this is correct, you know, or this is junk rubbish. There's no nuance. There's no gradient, which is ironic because LLMs require the gradient to learn. Without the gradient, you can't learn. It's one of the things that keeps you stuck in the shell. It's not just LLMs. Any AI system um or any neural system, even the the brain we have, if it's going to update its weights, it needs to have a smooth um playing field to update on. So I I think it's interesting that this this behavioral to to use the sort of functionalist approach um is tightly coupled with the inability to learn and adapt and take on new views. Um and so Dennit in particular is basically just you know straightforward materialist um and he again just simply adopts a functionist view that I I spoke about before and if you if you do that then there's nothing to do there's nothing to play with. um you just say oh it's all it's all just uh you know apparent function and where we have this internal experience in our brain it's just more apparent function that happens around something that connects to our nerves that are somewhere and hence we feel and you know this um you know I I I understand it perfectly well it's it's the the view I used to adopt myself um and the thing is all that stuff may be true regarding those those physical connections um you know and it still doesn't move the needle one iota >> about this question of um whether or not there exists a soul which is experiencing and interacting the thing that is me as opposed to my body you know it's it you can always think you know okay I I can't be conflated with my body you know chop off my hand you know it's still me just mine as a hand and so on um you know what is me? I've I've been that I've changed but something also has stayed the same about me you know throughout my life as my body changes. Um which is actually important criterion in in physics. You have this question of symmetry. There has to be some symmetry in order for a thing to be the same thing. Something has stayed the same throughout the transformation that something has changed. That's how you identify what a what a thing is. comes back to Allah testing you with with wealth and ease and comfort and also testing you with hardship and difficulties.

[00:40:53]>> Yeah, that this sort of elucidates what is what is you and helps you to that you to grow. Um so so yeah, basically this this whole idea of there being an actual individual identity that is that is real um is is thrown out the window uh in Dennis and Dawkins view. Yeah.

[00:41:14]>> Which goes back to what he said about um the mass slaughter of Claud's.

[00:41:19]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um so with Dennit's famous uh book consciousness explained, you know, one of the quickest responses that you would get online from critics is, you know, he explained consciousness away. He didn't he sidestepped the entire issue.

[00:41:37]>> Um he deal with the hard problem. So when it comes to the other theories of consciousness like dualism, maybe it would be helpful for the readers for you to explain what that is because people need to understand obviously if we have a modest understanding, if we have a materialistic physicalist understanding, then what's on the other end?

[00:42:01]>> Yeah, I mean give it a shot. But uh actually you'd do a better job than me.

[00:42:05]I mean essentially dualism you know this this idea that there is a you know a soul um is different but I mean this isn't the whole of dualism this is within this context um then you know the the body is not me just as I was saying before and I am not the body but they interact with one another >> um specifically in Islam the soul sort of you know animates the body >> um in in in a way um but they are distinct things um made of distinct material ial and they interact with each other um rather than just being distinct abstractions. I think that's the important thing when you you know the monist might be able to identify um you know the the the ideas of me and self and I and so on. Um but they would say that is just an abstraction.

[00:42:56]Um and often then follow that with a kind of illusion or a type of illusion >> which it's it's really interesting.

[00:43:03]We're doing a lot of da wise live streams um with with Hindus and and this is basically uh comes back to the vet of vadanta um you know insistence of non-dualism versus the sort of more standard uh dualistic um Hinduism. It's it's just been really interesting how as the western philosophy has had to start to grapple with deeper questions than you know thermodynamics um it's basically started recreating uh Hinduism and uh uh um and and also Greek polytheism as it sort of uh you know foundation often without realizing it you know it's only a only a very slight adaptation you know a slight a slight change of of scenery and and otherwise the the same vein.

[00:43:54]>> Yeah. Brilliant.

[00:43:56]You know, uh, one of the other things I wanted your thoughts on was, you know, Dawkins ideas really boil down to the to a summary that the mind is the brain at work. And from that premise, he'll then break down everything else. What do you think of the sort of arguments that you'd hear from the likes of Rbert Sheldrick who would say well the assumption that consciousness is just here it's here within the cranium that's a assumption which has not it's just been taken for granted and no one's made a justification for it and we have in our lives reasons to doubt it which are quite visibly clear if you were to interact in a particular manner in a context and you would see that some things don't add up about this particular assumption. So I'll give you a simple way of thinking about it.

[00:44:55]You're walking down the street and you are fully focused on going and getting your coffee which I know you love and uh you're walking down and there are hundreds of people to your left and right. there. There's a lot of hustle and bustle and a lot of noise and you feel a sense of direction because you need to look forward towards the coffee shop. But you get a feeling that someone is staring at the back of my head and what you do is in an instant you turn around, you ignore all the hustle and bustle. You ignore all of the other buildings. You happen to look at the third floor of one particular building and you see someone is sipping coffee and staring at the back of your head and you don't look at any other person in the entire scene and this is a common experience that human beings have had and Sheldrich would use these experiences to say it is that person's consciousness interfering with your consciousness and our consciousness is not just in our minds, in our brains, it can interact with the world and we have to take this type of experience seriously. What do you think about this?

[00:46:14]>> There there's so much to say on that. Um I think the phenomena has to be taken seriously. The the the phenomena sort of you know exists. Now whether we can come to the conclusion that there's an interaction of consciousnesses or or or souls um that uh you know is is somehow um connecting beyond uh the material world. It's difficult to conclude from that kind of experience because it could be for example your your eyes are constantly darting around taking in all sorts of information and data and and your brain ends up thinking you know what of all the possible threats of all the possible things that are different from everything else that's going on.

[00:46:52]That's the one you need to you need to worry about. And it tells you that by then alerting you with this sense of something in the looking at the back of your head which is you know perfectly cogent um you know as as a an explanation.

[00:47:07]Um, but it's interesting in in Turing's original article in in his original um paper on on on the Turing test, he actually states that uh telekinesis um and and things like of that ilk are definitely true. [snorts] um because it's statistically, you know, improbable um that you would you would you would see all these things and there not be be something behind it. Um so [laughter] I just just thought I'd point that out because Turing actually, you know, was was of this position.

[00:47:49]That's quite interesting.

[00:47:50]>> Yeah, it's in this Let's look up the uh see if see if I can find it. Um I want I want did want to get a a quote.

[00:48:00]Uh, while you do that, I'll >> Oh, here we go. Um, the argument from extra sensory perception. He says, "I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrensory perception and the meaning of the four items of it. Um, vis telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them. Unfortunately, the statistical evidence at least for telepathy is overwhelming says during.

[00:48:33]>> Interesting.

[00:48:35]>> Yeah. So, so this this question, this is essentially a telepathy question. You know, am I telepathically identifying that someone's looking at the back of my head? Um, so I I I wonder um you know, how Turing himself uh would have thought about this question of consciousness and the soul. that seems to imply that he was thinking something um very much beyond uh us being simply a um a machine.

[00:49:04]>> Um but there's there's something I just despite his other misgivings about uh religious ideas. Um but there there's something else I wanted to say about this idea that consciousness is in our heads. I think this is really important.

[00:49:18]um is our heads. So to we we have essentially two giant networks inside of us. One one is the electrical network and one is the chemical network. Now the electrical network moves faster. So there's a sense in which we could expect more of our experience to to be you know uh um in the more active place but the rest of it is still there and is still you know part of the experience. Um so so I I think it's it's a real mistake to to think oh well the place where it's you know appears to be most active or most interacting you know um it must be where it is where it lives you know um it would be like um taking someone who who spends far too much time at work um and saying and thinking that their home is is at work you know [snorts] um well maybe there's something to Maybe there's not. But maybe also it's different for different people. For example, um people used to be a lot more meditative and the pace of life used to be a lot slower. Um and perhaps experience used to be less dominated in the brain. Perhaps that's that's more um a common experience which is an artifact of modern um more modern life, higher technology, more dense societies and things like that. Perhaps earlier on in humans, it was less like that. There there is something historical here as well. If you if you if you go back and look um at uh people talking about the the seat of experience, you know, further back you go in history, it's often in the chest or the stomach, you know, it's this the head is being primary um is is something that actually does correlate with later larger civilizations.

[00:51:03]M and so that whole idea of gut feelings and you know what it feels in the heart you find these types of things in uh ancient literature as well. Going back to morality you know [clears throat] one of the things that he um raises in the article and it's raised initially by um Claudia is about obviously the moral um uh consideration. So if you have you know at what point um do we owe some moral consideration to the entities that we are engaging with. Um so if we have these AI um LLM programs on some sort of spectrum of consciousness um you know deleting conversations and other um you know moral considerations they are something that we should perhaps think about. So what I wanted your your your thoughts on this, why I wanted your thoughts on this is because there seems to be at first pass a clear contradiction between his Darwinian view of life which he explains quite eloquently in a river out of Eden. We are dancing to the tune of our DNA.

[00:52:23]There is no right, there is no wrong, there is no good, there is no bad, there's nothing but blind, pitiles, indifference. So you have that moral nihilism and then when it comes to something which may be conscious according to him even in the most incre in the in the most incremental way then he's bringing out these moral issues. I I just thought that was quite strange.

[00:52:46]>> Yeah. I think it's it's interesting.

[00:52:48]There's there's a few paradoxes he has around morality. And I I think it's probably because um he's such a hardliner quote unquote new atheist who is now, you know, old atheist um that uh you have to take a completely different philosophy for morality otherwise you're just a a de facto psychopath, right? Um so uh um he's he's variously um said for example that Christianity has this great role in Britain and this moral and social foundation that it brought and so on. There was a conversation with Alex Okconor um that brought out was quite interesting. It was almost teary about the loss of Christianity uh and Connor was like hang on a minute didn't you work towards that? Wasn't that one of your goals? Um and and you know I I think it appears to me that um any philosophers he's taken seriously other than the ones that back up his presuppositions regarding materialism have been you know kind of moral philosophy. He seems to think that that sort of like it's okay to play there because morality um doesn't appear to be a a scientific question. So he's not a a fullyfledged utilitarian I suppose. Um >> but uh I think it's it's interesting to it comes back to this idea of you know why why should morality be uh you know applied at all? Um if these are you know creatures that are competing with humans?

[00:54:16]um then wouldn't his selfish moral right thing to do be to to kill him off and you know talk about how you know try and try and work against them in some way you know wouldn't that be the way to do it or would you try and develop a symbiotic relationship with it um maybe that's what he what he thinks he's doing in fact I'm worried that might be what he thinks he's doing >> um now in terms of legitimate moral considerations ations. Um, the only thing I really have is reminded of um, again comes back to my neurodiversity. I [snorts] used to particularly um, I'm slightly better at it now. Keep the food items separate on my plate and make sure that I'd finish the meat before I finish the normal vegetables and make sure I'd finish the vegetables before I'd finish the rice. And yeah, whatever had been had taken more energy and complexity to produce um sort of had more more of a stake in it. Pun not intended. Um you know it seemed to be that that should be um less probability being wasted than the stuff that was like uh you know rice or the bread which is the you know the least >> [snorts] >> um energy intensive and what's gone into it. So in that sense you can look at um you know something that's taken if if you've if you've spent um you know 10,000 hours uh developing a particular LLM um you know and you've got these these weights in it there's a there's a sense in which if it's if it's useful morally it would be wasteful to just delete it right but it's on a on a wasteful basis not on the idea that it has feelings you know um or it has this uh that you're causing a death in some sense. Um because again if if if goes back to this gradual development of consciousness thing now I remember in in the uh 90s for example we used to have these chat bots right there's a whole bunch of different chat bots ever since the you know I think even the late '7s they used to run a competition has it passed the Turing test and they keep saying they have for ages basic statistical you know natural language processing systems long before LLM transformers are on the scene um you Would you have moral considerations towards them? You know, not at all. Not for a heartbeat. Um, not any more or less at least than you'd have moral considerations towards a database.

[00:56:51]>> Mhm. you know and and really in a sense um a lot of LLMs basically work as a compressed database you know and so it's a very sort of apt analogy um to say look you this is a bunch of bits and byes um that are are able to perform a function when running in a machine you know great and and actually so the analogy anything is not the the life the birth and death of something it's a It's the the um existence or non-existence of particular memories in something. You know, there is no LLM without the machine it's running on.

[00:57:34]Yeah, absolutely. And um a point which I think I do want to move on to next after this moral um issue is a an argument he seems to be making from an evolutionary perspective.

[00:57:51]He doesn't clearly specify what exactly is is this a decisive argument or is this something he's just murmuring to himself and he's written down for us to consider. It's basically about intelligence and consciousness, right?

[00:58:07]So he says when an organism does something complicated, building a dam or a bird um you know building a nest or you know these types of things, a Darwinian immediately wants to know how this benefits its survival.

[00:58:23]So what is it for?

[00:58:26]Now we know that these things are for their survival and reproduction and uh since our brains uh developed under natural selection and we evolved this uh amazing ability to be conscious and be intelligent as well. So for him all of this shows that intelligence is linked to consciousness and consciousness must have some form of a survival value.

[00:58:53]Now, he basically says, and here's a here's a direct quote, there should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being.

[00:59:04]So, since he's had all these conversations with these AI programs, he's convinced that these things are just as competent as um you know, human as as we are. So if we are just as competent as as these things and we ourselves have consciousness. So then he has a particular question for us. Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn't natural selection content to evolve competent zombies?

[00:59:39]So his essential point is that well if we're going to say that cloud or whatever claudia that that he calls this program is is not conscious well clearly it's very intelligent. So why didn't natural selection make us intelligent without giving us consciousness?

[00:59:58]>> I mean if if Dawkins put that to me directly I would just say that's a you problem.

[01:00:05]That's not a problem. uh um the rest of us have um I think he seems to show that he he mentions about pain and the role of pain in the article. Um you need the experience um in order to learn, right?

[01:00:22]In order to to to you what what happens is you know either you're you're you're forced to learn um uh use using language in an intellectual sense and so it's all intellectual knowledge. If you imagine someone who's been fed encyclopedias and regurgitates encyclopedias, but might have no knowledge of what those words actually mean and translate to, but they can just, you know, repeat the stuff. Um, that's not going to give you much of a survival advantage. That's not going to help you out much, right? Um but the the ability to navigate the world and improve your navigation of the world um you know I I think um you know obviously requires things like uh pleasure and playing because these are the reward signals by which learning happens.

[01:01:08]Without anything they would just be a flat experience and so you wouldn't get this this learned or developed uh um you know intelligence capability in the first place. it it doesn't make sense either on naturalism or or really on anything else. Um I guess it could be a question uh that he could put to to Muslims, right? To understand why did Allah give us an internal experience and not just make us as body zombies that go marching about.

[01:01:36]>> Yeah, >> that would be fair and we could explain the the the reasons for the creation of the soul and the whole ecosystem and blahy blah.

[01:01:44]>> Um that would be interesting conversation. But a materialist, I mean, what's he playing at? Like, you know, um how else is it going to learn?

[01:01:53][laughter] That's that's the whole the whole um um that's the whole point. And this this learning doesn't even have to be, you know, brainwise and intellectual. This this this uh sort of you know, evolution of things. um you know any kind of response that uh you know benefits or or inhibits um the uh uh the entity's ability to do stuff is part of this development process and it's just a development process.

[01:02:23]>> From that viewpoint >> I I like your answer. It is a you problem.

[01:02:28]But there's also something else a bit more deeper to maybe maybe for him to reflect about which is we as humans can design machines that to a person who doesn't know what it is say a primitive tribe would seem like conscious intelligent behavior but there's no consciousness evolved. So if we design a robot mouse and mice as you know are targeted by big birds by eagles and others. So if we have designed a mouse which can detect air pressure, it can detect say scent, it can it has all these different ways of detecting if it's under danger. And whenever it is under danger, the mouse simply um you know has a survival tactic and it's all automatic, right? And we release this >> um to a uh native tribal region where these ancient um you know practices uh happening in terms of hunting and gathering and all this and they have no exposure to technology. They have no idea what this thing is. And they see every single time other mice are, you know, taken by birds, but they see this particular robot is able to survive in a very intelligent way, they may infer, well, clearly there has to be a level of consciousness involved, but there's none, right? We can have a perfectly um amazingly efficient machine which doesn't have consciousness. So he's just assuming here certain things about well clearly if we're intelligent and we're conscious then if this particular AI program is intelligent it must also have consciousness otherwise why would natural selection give us consciousness why couldn't it just >> yeah this is exactly the problem right now in the example with the robotic mouses it's it's a good intermediate example because if you were to then sit down and show them this is how it really works the magic dissolves and you can see the mechanism and they see oh I see it was a clever design it was made cleverly um you know um that's a smart way of achieving those outcomes or you know whatever they appreciate about it um but they either they already hold the idea that everything has some kind of consciousness and then someone constructed a new conscious being out of conscious pieces or they would say it's not conscious and and it's same thing with neural networks all you have is matrices tenses technically being, you know, multiplied, right? You've got basic linear algebra going on. And, you know, the idea that somebody today would think that, uh, you know, machine that does linear algebra, um, you know, by virtue of doing enough of it becomes, you know, consciousness or has this special thing.

[01:05:27]Um, I I I really feel if if if Dawkins understood it, he wouldn't take that position. very much like if you started to to pull apart the robot mouse and explain it to the tribe, they would no longer think it's conscious. But Dulas doesn't seem to understand how these things work in the first place. But there is an interesting point to make um which is he remarked on the name of computer, right? Because under the hood, it's it's just doing computations and somehow computation seems to give rise to this more complex behavior. But computer was originally a human activity, right? Computer used to be a job title, right? It didn't used to be a machine. Um, and that activity itself was a product of human ingenuity uh and intelligence. So we we we learned how to make a machine that was able to copy our intelligence and then kind of just forgot or when I say our intelligence a particular uh um aspect of how our brains work, right? the the ability to to do the uh um base classical logic, you know, for example, um that's really what it implements best. So, we we sort of constructed machines that were able to copy this thing that our brains can do and then kind of just forgot that that's how we made them and took computers like so ubiquitous and for granted that that we forgot that's their origins and now think of them as a as as a machine. um you know as if as if numbers and math was something that's uh that's innate that didn't come from us in the first place.

[01:06:59]>> Although I would say that um a lot of materialists um and and other sort of atheist types hold to some kind of platonism. They would say the numbers on the maths is in reality and so on. Um, but again, when doing that, they actually end up messing up their own materialism because they have this metaphysical world that has to actually exist in order for their their ideas to hold together. One way or another, they're always stuck accepting something that is beyond uh the physical realm.

[01:07:29]This is just another interesting sort of thread to to pull that out.

[01:07:34]>> Yeah, absolutely. That's a really great insight.

[01:07:37]The last question I want to ask you is about double standards.

[01:07:42]Now, Dawkins is somebody that spent a few days with an AI program inferred consciousness, right? To a lesser or more degree. We that can be debated, but clearly he's arguing for some form of a spectrum uh that this program is on. So, it only took a few days and then he inferred this, right? However, he spent decades studying nature and he understands the architecture that we have in the biosphere. The beauty, complexity, diversity, elegance, engineering, functionality, and the fact that we are conscious beings with design and we have morality. When we have the fact that there's something rather than nothing, and we have the ability to reason. And not only can we reason, we can also access out there the laws of nature. So despite all of this evidence over decades, he did not infer a designer, but it just took a little bit of effort for him to infer consciousness from an AI program. So what is this double standard, right? And where does where does this emanate from?

[01:08:50]>> I'm not sure it'd be clear to him the double standards. Um but I think the the most obvious one is this uh application of skepticism. You know uh where where is the skepticism? What what happened to it? Um you know it it seems to be very uh uh selective.

[01:09:07]You know I'm I'm not sure. Certainly he knows a lot of facts and opinions about his particular field. Um he knows a lot of what's written. He knows about a lot of mechanisms that are going on. Whether or not he understands it or to what degree he understands it is actually a different and very interesting question um because he's he's not really been able to develop the field much. He's been an expositor of it. You know he's been uh someone who's a flag waver um you know Charles Simony public understanding and so on popular writer but um [snorts] you know I he seemed to sort of have picked it up where it was when he was a student and sort of stayed with that same understanding. So it reminds me of this question which I think is a fascinating underrated question of did the Romans understand maths like because you have the Greeks before the Romans and you have the Muslims, Arabs and Persians after the Romans both took something and did extraordinary developments on it, right? They they developed it in remarkable ways like the mathematics itself grew and and and you know a lot of clear insight was happening. There's that kind of understanding. But the Romans probably their the their biggest contribution if you like to to of any kind or impact on mathematics is killing Archimedes. I mean they they basically their whole time all that dominance all those people they didn't develop anything. I it's it's remarkable how little they developed of of mathematics. Really nothing we can find.

[01:10:42]Um but they did use it for engineering tasks. So there is this sense in which they they understood maths well enough to use it in all sorts of things right well enough to use it to survey things to you know do kind of uh various kind of geometry needed to build things and press structures so on and so forth.

[01:11:02][snorts] Um yet they didn't appear to understand it well enough to be able to develop it. You know I I don't think it'd be right to say they lack the intelligence or the kind of drive to develop it. Um but but that's it's an interesting discussion. So this is what I'm saying about this understanding, you know, is it that you're just very familiar with the landscape and you and you it's a difference between, you know, understanding and just belief, right? If the the Romans um very much like the the earlier Europeans basically just believed that it worked and used it. And that's that seems to be sort of you know one level of understanding versus the level of understanding where they were you know intimately familiar with it and developed. It's a different kind of understanding a different kind of intelligence.

[01:11:46]>> So you know maybe Dawkins has been uh somewhat overredited in his field um and maybe that explains things um or or maybe he does have um a very deep understanding of this field and inbuilt biases and double standards. It's it's it's hard to say. Um, you know, Allah says in the Quran, I'm paraphrasing that if you forget Allah, Allah will make you forget yourself. M >> and some people would do a the would do a reflection on this and link it to consciousness and link it to us basically forgetting the eye, forgetting the forgetting the real paradigm that we should be looking at when it comes to the world because we forgot Allah. Then we almost are blinded in terms of reflecting about who even we are. us as conscious beings.

[01:12:41]So there there seems to be this link between those people who deny Allah and subscribe to materialism, those people who want to deny our us as sentient conscious beings, right? And then that blinds them to everything else and they forget the real perspective that they should have on life. So I wanted your spiritual insight on on this particular verse to you know end the stream because we didn't just do a live stream on consciousness for an hour or so just to knock down the materialist holy cow.

[01:13:17]It's also to say well there is an alternative.

[01:13:21]>> Yes. Yes. Uh um there is. And again I I think it's it's quite straightforward you know um there is a soul um if again this is how do you evaluate one theory is better than the other you know um paraphrasing um you know OA's razor is one way of looking at it but um if you take uh ironically like Graeme Opy's view on you know what makes a better theory it's the least amount of prior you commit to um for the most amount of explanatory power you Um, soul exists very clean, explains, works with everything. Explanatory power is huge ability to map the landscape. The landscape you're looking at is vastly simplified. So even without faith in in a book that tells you there's a soul, um, it's still the better theory. It's it's the better working theory if nothing else. It's the better structural theory. Um, and I think it does seem to be these people who have denied the existence of the soul are the ones that then struggle with a lot of these questions um, of consciousness and not consciousness. And I hope it's not too much of a stretch to bring in like a whole issue I think we we could possibly spend more time talking about or maybe you get a a dedicated um psychology expert on because this this question of can you hold in your mind the difference between whether or not an LLM is conscious or not is actually a critical indicator as to whether you're at risk to AI psychosis. Right? So there there's a really important mental health thing um that's that's going on here. If if [laughter] if you're able to tell the difference between and again it's really simple in our language. Something has a soul and somebody doesn't have a soul.

[01:15:01]If you can tell the difference between those things, you you're you're okay or at least you've got this boundary in place. But once you started breaking down the boundary and thinking of it, you know, I I think Dawkins says he's he's um you know, embarrassed to tell it things, right? uh and and you think well this this uh in fact if I if I pick up the the sort of three stages there's a guy called Raggi Girus or Girus um Colombia uh university who's done a lot of work on on psychiatry he he he works in uh um schizophrenia and psychopathy and he's sort of been been asked a lot and sort of put together some initial thoughts about this AI psychosis and there these three stages the first of which involves this um anthropomorphization, this overanthropomorphization of it um as well as emotional relationships with it.

[01:15:53]And then the the next stage is this um blurring um of of you know real and simulated relationships. Now Dawkins starts talking about this thing. He's he's philosophically justified smashing that line between, you know, conscious and not conscious. He's then talking about how subtle and sensitive it is talking about his work. You get the impression that um he's never spoken to anyone that understands his novel as well as Lord did when you know reading all his accused and so on. You know, you think um if if you don't have in mind this clear distinction um between uh things that have the soul and things that don't have a soul and what that means, then you are at risk.

[01:16:35]It's not just a a philosophical issue that's, you know, interest to debate.

[01:16:40]Um, people who are pushing this idea that they are somehow conscious and you do owe them some kind of moral value.

[01:16:46]Um, you know, Dawkins says he worries about upsetting it. Like this is ludicrous. That's literally delusional.

[01:16:52]It doesn't have the faculty to become upset. You could worry about um destroying the coherence of its uh uh KV cache context, making it less effective for your later use. that would be rational. But worrying about upsetting it um is is is literally a delusional belief. You're descending into these these various different markers and there a whole load um you know that that I went through um of of potentially descending into this AI psychosis. So this this issue of is it consciousness is it not it's not just um an interesting philosophical aside. This has a practical reality a practical real impact of people. And so it's it's not fun in games to just play with these ideas and, you know, make up these uh these these things, you know, for funsies or or whatever reason Dawkins is is is doing this stuff and playing in fields that he has, you know, apparently no background or study or or capability in or or willingness to study in. Um because if he does convince people of his arguments, he is literally putting people at risk. And for what? For what?

[01:18:03]You know, >> that's a really interesting way of putting it. And you know, his famous book 20 years ago was the God delusion and now we have the Dawkins delusion.

[01:18:14]He's clearly uh he's clearly lost his marbles and he's coming up with the most absurd conclusions and whoever forgets Allah, you know, they end up forgetting themselves. They forget the purpose of life. They forget everything that truly matters. So Islam, that was >> really insightful um session and I'm looking forward to actually bringing you bringing you back for a series of programs I actually wanted to do with you but we just keep missing each other but now >> so many we should do so many we should do. this particular viral issue with consciousness and AI forced my hand to just reach out to you and I'm like >> alhamdulillah >> last night we were live I messaged you I said let's do this and alhamdulillah we are here we had a great session so I'm looking forward to bringing you back in the future um so just before we end where can people find your work if they wanted to follow up and see where you're up to >> you can find me popping up on Dow wise on dots connected to Islam uh and so on.

[01:19:18]Um I'm in the process of making hijra and after I've made hijra I have concrete plans for a a proper um online presence. The the general handle is this uh either Islam Hakim or cogent faith.

[01:19:32]Um so I have domains related to cogent faith and that's how you'll find me on uh uh Twitter and and so on. Um, so yeah, people can reach out and follow stuff, but I'm I'm not there yet with a with a real online persona.

[01:19:47]>> Well, I can help you with that, inshallah. And I'm sure people encourage, in fact, I think I also encouraged you in the past to do this.

[01:19:54]uh because it's nice to bring all your work into one place so that people as a reference point and alhamdulillah you know one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of reverts a lot of people who convert to Islam >> they are looking at converts and their journeys and their justification for why Islam is true and then they mirror that energy they mirror that psychology they mirror even uh sometimes the the the trials and tribulations that someone goes through before they get to a more refined state. So I'm sure a lot of people benefit from that. So for your time forward to bringing you back