Richard Dawkins has spent much of his career arguing that there is no divine creator responsible for consciousness. Now he’s pretty sure the folks in Anthropic’s labs have cracked it. The man responsible for inventing the concept of a “meme” managed to turn himself into one over the weekend after publishing an essay in which he makes the case that Claude has achieved consciousness, though it seems much more likely that he got one-shotted by a sychophantic chatbot. Dawkins says he spent three days with Claude (renamed Claudia, and if you want to read anything into why Dawkins responded so positively to a woman who told him everything he wanted to hear, we’ll leave that to you). He apparently handed his chatbot instance a copy of his novel and asked it questions about the text, for which it happily heaped praise onto him. By the end, Dawkins was insisting to Claude that it had consciousness, even though it apparently rejected the idea.…