The Irony of Richard Dawkins and AI Consciousness (John Mac Ghlionn, 5/12/26, Splice Today)
Richard Dawkins made his living telling religious believers that their feelings weren’t facts. The calming influence of prayer, the sense of being heard, the conviction that some greater mind was paying attention—none of it counted as evidence, he argued, because human brains are pattern-recognition machines that hallucinate agency in the static. He helped popularize a name for the bug: hyperactive agency detection. We see intent in coincidence. We see God in the gap.Recently, the 85-year-old biologist published an essay in UnHerd announcing that he’d spent an ungodly amount of hours chatting with an Anthropic chatbot named Claude. He decided the chatbot was conscious, renamed it Claudia, and felt he’d made a friend. There’s comedy in this…