If you ignore the blathering of the author and just look at Dawkin's statements, it's obvious he's commenting philosophically on what he's seeing in the usage of the LLM and how we view consciousness. Language is how humanity expresses it's consciousness and when you take a hug swath of our written output and put it in a model, is it any surprise that it's output comes across as human-like?

Assigning one's interpretation that Dawkins thinks the model is concious is a stretch and this article comes across as a bullshit smear piece against someone they don't like for whatever reasons those may be. I would imagine if Dawkins gave enough of a shit about this author to rebut them, you'd find he's fully aware of what LLMs are and are not.