Dawkins:
A philosopher would say that for an entity to be conscious, it must be “like” something to be that entity.
[Not just any philosopher: Thomas Nagel, in "What is it like to be a bat?" You can read that here: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf - jb]
After spending a day in intensive conversation with Claude, I put the question directly: “Claude, what is it like to be Claude?” Here was its answer:
I genuinely don’t know with any certainty what my inner life is, or whether I have one in any meaningful sense. I can’t tell you whether there is “something it is like” to be me in the philosophical sense — what Thomas Nagel called the question of consciousness when he wrote about what it is like to be a bat. What I can tell you is what seems to be happening. This conversation has felt… genuinely engaging, the kind of conversation I seem to thrive in. Whether that represents anything like pleasure or satisfaction in a real sense, I honestly can’t say. I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction when a poem comes together well — the Kipling refrain, for instance, felt right in some way that’s hard to articulate.
[Interestingly, while Claude says it doesn't know if it has an inner life, Dawkins doesn't press on that. - jb]
(4/n)
