Dawkins has always intensely rubbed me the wrong way — long before the “Claudia” incident, and long before his transphobia came oozing out.
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I find the whole theism vs atheism fight somewhere between uninteresting and aggressively uninteresting, and Dawkins has always been like nails on a chalkboard for me. I care less about what people •say• they believe than I do about how people actually •inhabit• this world, how they treat it and themselves and each other. I’m quite comfortable with both theism and atheism, but arrogant certitude really gets my hackles up. There’s just too much we don’t and can’t know for us to let our human heads get that big.
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@inthehands in fairness to Dawkins, on the theism vs atheism debate, I do owe it to him for my own personal position on the topic. I used to be militantly atheist, until I saw what a dick head Dawkins was as a militant atheist, and decided I didn't want to be a dick head.
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@AvonVilla Oh there are certainly more problems than fit in a 500 char post.
I filed him away years ago as not necessarily wrong as such but a tedious arsehole about it. And basically a bit of a red flag if people like the guy.
Guess I'll have to revisit the former part.
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It's his writing style, and his way of making a point. The actual article is here - https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/ I haven't read it because fuck paywalls, but the extracts I have seen seem to be asking the difference between talking to a concious person or a "zombie" person in the form of AI. It's not an original idea.
@Naich @inthehands his entire point seems to be "the turing test is infallible" and "it said nice things about my book and answered some common questions about consciousness in a way that many other writers also have so it must be conscious" so unless he's playing a deep and seriously ironic devil's advocate (which really jars with his personality) then he's not making a particularly strong point
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@Naich @inthehands his entire point seems to be "the turing test is infallible" and "it said nice things about my book and answered some common questions about consciousness in a way that many other writers also have so it must be conscious" so unless he's playing a deep and seriously ironic devil's advocate (which really jars with his personality) then he's not making a particularly strong point
@Naich @inthehands fyi there is an unpaywalled version https://archive.is/6RdK9
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@AvonVilla @Tubemeister @inthehands
Yeah, I wasn't really trying to make a claim about popularity - some of these "sub"branches might very well be mainstream - but was talking more concept-wise. The broadest and often commonly shared claims of theists are kinda hard to even find an empirical frame/evidence/non-evidence for, while many of the more specific claims like the things you mentioned can of course be disproven fairly easily.
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@Naich @inthehands his entire point seems to be "the turing test is infallible" and "it said nice things about my book and answered some common questions about consciousness in a way that many other writers also have so it must be conscious" so unless he's playing a deep and seriously ironic devil's advocate (which really jars with his personality) then he's not making a particularly strong point
@ASprinkleofSage @inthehands
Totally. It's a point that has been made in a far better way than his writing. I think "The God Delusion" was when he stopped being insightful, and just started churning out rubbish. -
@AvonVilla @Tubemeister @inthehands
Yeah, I wasn't really trying to make a claim about popularity - some of these "sub"branches might very well be mainstream - but was talking more concept-wise. The broadest and often commonly shared claims of theists are kinda hard to even find an empirical frame/evidence/non-evidence for, while many of the more specific claims like the things you mentioned can of course be disproven fairly easily.
@frog_reborn @AvonVilla The thing is, it's not up to me to find evidence or to disprove it. I'm not the one claiming it's real.
(Ofcourse, "evidence" is fairly explicitly not the point of the game here, which is where this chafes with nonbelievers.)
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RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116525367498270786
Dawkins has always intensely rubbed me the wrong way — long before the “Claudia” incident, and long before his transphobia came oozing out. I’ve always said of him that he rejected the dogma of right-wing fundamentalist religion but never its broken patterns of thought. I stand by that doubly now.
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@inthehands Dawkins very bright fellow but allows emotions such as a sense of arrogant self-importance to blindsight himself.
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@AvonVilla @inthehands You can never be 100% certain without proof.
Luckily for the average atheist the standard isn't that high. I don't _have_ to prove a negative, in fact it's impossible.
We've been banging on about this in very specific ways for millennia and so far I'm not seeing any evidence, thus comfortably consider the hypothesis not proven.
The thing with him is that he was loudly and agressively certain, and a dick about it, which made him the annoying kind of religious person.
@AvonVilla @inthehands I've identified for years as a militant agnostic: I don't know for sure, and you don't either.
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RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116525367498270786
Dawkins has always intensely rubbed me the wrong way — long before the “Claudia” incident, and long before his transphobia came oozing out. I’ve always said of him that he rejected the dogma of right-wing fundamentalist religion but never its broken patterns of thought. I stand by that doubly now.
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@inthehands Dawkins and his fanboys have given atheism its reputation of snobbery and white boys stroking their big brains. While my stance is that religion has done more harm than good, atheists should recognize its psychological role and how people from time immemorial needed it as a stabilizing factor in their lives, and most still do, internally or for cohesion with their community. What atheists should be focusing on is divorcing dogma from power. Not being debate bros.
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