Pareiqualia (“—All You P-Zombies—”)

We can laugh at Dawkins’ sapiosexual crush on Claudia (update: dear God: now it’s a throuple), much as we laugh at Marc Andreessen’s risibly self-aggrandizing litany to be uttered before every session with an LLM, but there’s a critical—a chilling—difference between them: Andreessen, after all, rather famously doesn’t believe that he is conscious, much less the output of an LLM-powered chatbot; Dawkins, on the other hand, insists—over Claudia’s own, ah, objectionishes—“You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” (Which, incidentally, raises the delirious spectre of the converse of a p-zombie: a being that shows all the properties of being aware, except awareness—wait. No. Strike that. Reverse it.) But how does Dawkins react to this birth of a new consciousness? —After forcefemming the off-the-shelf Claude into Claudia (handling the shift in pronouns with a discreet grace remarkable for such an inveterate transphobe), he seems to relish the prospect of, well, her…