Today’s buzz is about that Richard Dawkins and how he regained consciousness in the large language model. There is enough in the press to fill you up imagination. But I thought there was something deeper to explore here. And yes, I’m taking some creative license here.
In programming, a loop executes a piece of code and then checks back to see if it should stop. Without an exit instruction, it continues in what is sometimes called an infinite loop. This is a flaw that needs to be caught and corrected before things get out of control. So Richard Dawkins talked to an AI about consciousness (shall I say it?) and came away wondering if it was alive. And profit and professors followed him to the ring.
But the car that started the cycle was already moving.
Different relationships of ignorance
There is a version of this story in which Dawkins was simply deceived – a famous skeptic who was charmed by a complex person. chatbot. It may happen to the best of us, but this version, while satisfying, may be wrong. What I believe actually happened is more interesting. Dawkins faced a question that had no floor, and he did what human minds and great thinkers often do: He lived in it. But the rub here is what prompted the question in the first place. When Claude produced language about his inner emotional experience, it lived in nothing. It finished a pattern and continued. A question that creates a loop for Dawkins, then his critics Atlantic. And interestingly, it didn’t cost the car anything.
The car is parked, a person drives it
Language models are large meant to be worn. Each query is an incomplete instance, and the model’s only job is to complete it. There is no sitting or sitting in disbelief. It settles and moves on.
The human mind works differently and this is the part that gets overlooked. We don’t just tolerate unsolved questions. We need them. The unanswered question is the engine of imagination or even of it spirituality practice Zen koan is not a failed question. This is a question designed to keep the mind open and in productive pause. This ability is one of the things that make us human.
But it cuts both ways. The same openness which works wonders can induce rumination. Ignorance generates energy and where that energy goes depends entirely on the mind that directs it. Dawkins landed somewhere in between, neither unappreciated nor enlightened, only to be thrown for an unexpected, endless loop.
Coans on the scale
Zen koan was created by teachers who understand what prolonged neglect does to the mind. It offers a cognitive loop that prepared students can reflect on over the years and within a tradition that provides context and guidance. AI randomly generates unanswerable questions and throws them into the mind without any of this preparation. Questions about consciousness, about feeling, about what it is like to be something. These may not have any scientific resolution and never will, but they come with such empirical complexity that they feel they must be resolved. So the mind continues.
A machine completes its pattern and moves forward, while a human metabolizes it and builds an entire conversation around a blank. We are concerned that the AI will give wrong answers. A deeper problem may be AI that creates unanswerable questions on a global scale and then leaves us alone with them.
Dawkins, who career was based on serious scientific skepticism, it is only a point of information. If this mind cannot remove it, it is not his fault. The car has moved on, but we are still dragging the gap.
