I was delighted to read Dr Simon Nieder’s cogent rebuttal of Richard Dawkins’s attribution of consciousness to the responses engendered by AI (Letters, 10 May). That human consciousness appears to have an innate tendency to project itself on to various othernesses has long been understood – John Ruskin termed it the pathetic fallacy – and that children animate their loved toys is readily observable.
But Wordsworth’s attribution of emotion to a mountain or my granddaughter’s lively conversations with Spice, her toy sloth, are, happily, unlikely to be dangerous. The conclusion that a widely harvested body of data on human response is equivalent to consciousness is naive and rather shocking in someone such as Prof Dawkins, who has founded his reputation and criticism of religious beliefs on a stringent rationalism.
Salley Vickers
London
