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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The latest “Claudia” story bears that out in two ways:
(1) Believing that he is in possession of some cosmic absolute truth about the underlying nature of reality, life, and consciousness, a truth it is his duty to tell other people they are wrong about.
(2) Arrogantly believing his own pareidolia to be evidence of a magical intelligence outside himself, one that he can •own• and that exists for his benefit.
(That latter one is especially rich from a person who wrote a book whose title broadly accused multiple billions of people of being delusional.)
2/3
@inthehands
His "Claudia" thing was about the nature of consciousness, rather than a belief that it was sentient. Despite the identical outputs from "Claudia" and humans, we have consciousness, and he was writing about what might make the difference between us and it.Yes, to my dismay he's turned out to be a pompous transphobe, but he's not completely lost the plot.
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It always felt like their priority was to •win•. Win what? Who knows. But they expected a prize.
@inthehands @wwahammy Haha, so this made me think: maybe this is like their pursuit of enlightenment, except rather than looking inward, those chasing intellectual superiority look outward for ‘wins’ over others so they never actually arrive anywhere
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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.
1/3
@inthehands “[Dawkins] rejected the dogma of right-wing fundamentalist religion but never its broken patterns of thought” is an extremely elegant way of framing it, thank you.
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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.
3/3
@inthehands NGL, but "the white, British, Oxford Professor who was born in Kenya and who's best known work is a book finding rationalisations for altruism as a biological trait in Evolution" ending like this is not really so much of a surprise. Pretty stacked there to be a racist, chauvinist, classist motherfucker.
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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.
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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.
1/3
@inthehands I identify as atheist, while my wife considers herself an apatheist. Probably the wiser position. Atheism is an explicit rejection, perhaps little childish, but for me personally it comes from rejecting a theist upbringing. I have always considered Dawkins adolescent literature though.
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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.
3/3
@inthehands My encounters with Dawkins always ended in frustration about how often he makes things up. Good at slick word patterns but no concern for evidence. He's like a LLM except that he doesn't confess and apologise between fabrications.
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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.
1/3
@inthehands USSR state atheism/materialism presents a great analogy IMO. The moment said state collapsed, yesterday’s atheists turned to religion.
Institutional atheism wasn’t the case of an educated shrugging off of religious thinking but rather a method of subverting it towards state worship.
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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.
1/3
I've got not time for evangelicals, atheist or theist, and the older I get the more they are the same thing to me.
And it seems most people who rant about religion come from a religious background and are still fighting it. The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference, and all that.
Plus they're usually ranting about Christians, but see themselves as nothing like the people ranting about Muslims or Jews.
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@inthehands
His "Claudia" thing was about the nature of consciousness, rather than a belief that it was sentient. Despite the identical outputs from "Claudia" and humans, we have consciousness, and he was writing about what might make the difference between us and it.Yes, to my dismay he's turned out to be a pompous transphobe, but he's not completely lost the plot.
@Naich @inthehands given that he attributed consciousness to an llm on the basis of some probing "how clever is my brilliant idea?" questions im gonna go out on a limb and declare there wasnt a lot of deep thought involved
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@Naich @inthehands given that he attributed consciousness to an llm on the basis of some probing "how clever is my brilliant idea?" questions im gonna go out on a limb and declare there wasnt a lot of deep thought involved
@Naich @inthehands if the whole exchange sounds like something straight out of sci fi, its probably because llms have ripped off thousands of sci fi books, a fact of which mr dawkins seems thoroughly unaware
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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.
@Tubemeister @AvonVilla @inthehands
"Not seeing any evidence" implies that you would know what evidence of it would even look like, which I'm not sure is even possible, except for some specific branches of theism making specific claims of course. Some of those can be rejected fairly easily.
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@inthehands
I mean, I went through an 'I am a loud atheist' phase, when I decided I wasn't going to go to seminary and therefore all religious people were rubes....but also I was 20? Now I just vaguely dodge the question, since it... isn't a question I get asked much and I am just certain I don't have a flame of belief.The whole aggressively someone who believes differently than I in unknowable is insufferable from either side, I find
@Oggie yep. I went thru an obnoxious phase, but what I realise now is that I was grieving. I'd lost a personally meaningful relationship with a father figure (in God), and I was angry that I had been given that only for it to be taken away.
And yeah, this was around about 20 years old. I was young, I'd been thrown out into the world to try to figure out where I fit, I was closeted to myself and the world, and I was struggling. I have compassion for the self I was back then.
And then as I found happiness and security in life, I grew out of this phase. I learnt to find confidence in not knowing everything, to sit with the fundamental uncertainty of being.
@inthehands -
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.
1/3
@inthehands the dude should have just retired in like 1994. Instead now decades of descent into embarrassment and ridicule.
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@Naich @inthehands given that he attributed consciousness to an llm on the basis of some probing "how clever is my brilliant idea?" questions im gonna go out on a limb and declare there wasnt a lot of deep thought involved
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.
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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.
3/3
@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.
