Richard Dawkins, famous for his book The God Delusion, and in the skeptical community for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science which merged with the Center for Inquiry in 2016, made headlines this week with his claim that a “female” persona of Claude, the large language model, is conscious. In fact, the original title for his blog post was to be “If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?”

Steven Novella, lead skeptic of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, dismantled Dawkins’ arguments saying among other things, “I found the article fascinating, not because I agree with his core claim or feel that he has contributed anything significant to the conversation, but because it seems to represent a scholar and deep thinker writing about a topic in which he lacks specific expertise.” Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist.

Novella, on the other hand, is a neurologist and physician, and his opinion on the subject is, “So no – I do not think Claude or any LLM is conscious. They are not designed to be, and they don’t have the function to be.”

This squabble is amazing from two prominent skeptics not for their opinions but for their certainty. Dawkins and Novella are both wrong because neither of them knows if Claude is conscious. They can’t know. They are making the same arguments that people have made for centuries over the existence of God.

Dawkins argues that the complexity and beauty of his conversation with Claude is evidence for consciousness in much the same way that believers argue that the complexity and beauty of the universe is evidence for God. How ironic! Novella argues that consciousness (like God) adds an assumption that is unnecessary to explain the data.

Dawkins asks the right question, “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?” but he asks it as if the answer is obvious. And Novella responds with incredible confidence, “this is an old question long answered.”

The more precise version of Dawkins’ question is, how can we measure consciousness? Can it be measured even in principle? We can measure correlates of consciousness/wakefulness in the human brain, but that is a very different question. This is where Novella himself reaches beyond his expertise.

The “God question” is external to science because science explicitly assumes natural causes for events. Miracles are not scientific explanations. The “consciousness question” is not outside science because it is miraculous. It is scientifically inaccessible because we lack an objective measure for consciousness. How could we measure whether there is something it is like to be Claude?